• Korean journal of communication and information
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• 제56권
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• pp.175-193
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• 2011

This study explored how South Korean newspapers covered North Korea's second nuclear test in May of 2009. Findings show that South Korean newspapers mostly reported North Korea's nuclear experiment in relatively negative tones. Their coverage mainly focused on the influences of nuclear threat from the North on the military, political and economic areas in South Korea. However, the media's agenda settings and frames were not similar in terms of each paper's political and ideological inclination. Whereas the progressive papers, such as the Hankyoreh and the Kyunghyang Shinmun, recognized that the current nuclear issue in Korean peninsula is getting worse because of South Korea's rigorous pressure on North Korea, the conservative papers, such as the Chosun Ilbo and the Donga Ilbo, see that the deadlock between North and South mainly comes from the system malfunction of North Korea. To prevent the current impasse, the left-side papers emphasized to develop the six-party talk in dealing with North Korean issue, while the right-wing papers paid attentions to the West's sanctions on North Korea and ensuring national security.

• Strategy21
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• 통권31호
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• pp.57-84
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• 2013

North Korea's continuous threats and provocative behaviors have aggravated tension on the Korean peninsula particularly with the recent nuclear weapons test. South Korea's best way to cope with this situation is to maintain the balance among three policy directions: dialogue, sanctions, and deterrence. Among the three, I argue that deterrence should be prioritized. There are different sources of deterrence such as military power, economic power, and diplomatic clouts. States can build deterrence capability independently. Alternatively, they may do so through relations with other states including alliances, bilateral relations, or multilateral relations in the international community. What South Korea needs most urgently is to maintain deterrence against North Korea's local provocations through the enhancement of independent military capability particularly by addressing the asymmetric vulnerability between militaries of the South and the North. Most of all, the South Korean government should recognize the seriousness of the negative consequences that North Korea's 'Nuclear shadow strategy' would bring about for the inter-Korea relations and security situations in Northeast Asia. Based on this understanding, it should develop an 'assertive deterrence strategy' that emphasizes 'multi-purpose, multi-stage, and tailored deterrence whose main idea lies in punitive retaliation.' This deterrence strategy requires a flexible targeting policy and a variety of retaliatory measures capable of taking out all targets in North Korea. At the same time, the force structures of the army, the air force, and the navy should be improved in a way that maximizes their deterrence capability. For example, the army should work on expanding the guided missile command and the special forces command and reforming the reserve forces. The navy and the air force should increase striking capabilities including air-to-ground, ship-to-ground, and submarine-to-ground strikes to a great extent. The marine corps can enhance its deterrence capability by changing the force structure from the stationary defense-oriented one that would have to suffer some degree of troop attrition at the early stage of hostilities to the one that focuses on 'counteroffensive landing operations.' The government should continue efforts for defense reform in order to obtain these capabilities while building the 'Korean-style triad system' that consists of advanced air, ground, and surface/ subsurface weapon systems. Besides these measures, South Korea should start to acquire a minimum level of nuclear potential within the legal boundary that the international law defines. For this, South Korea should withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Moreover, it should obtain the right to process and enrich uranium through changing the U.S.-South Korea nuclear cooperation treaty. Whether or not we should be armed with nuclear weapons should not be understood in terms of "all or nothing." We should consider an 'in-between' option as the Japanese case proves. With regard to the wartime OPCON transition, we need to re-consider the timing of the transition as an effort to demonstrate the costliness of North Korea's provocative behaviors. If impossible, South Korea should take measures to make the Strategic Alliance 2015 serve as a persisting deterrence system against North Korea. As the last point, all the following governments of South Korea should keep in mind that continuing reconciliatory efforts should always be pursued along with other security policies toward North Korea.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제52권11호
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• pp.2613-2619
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• 2020

This work investigated the gamma-ray shielding performance, and the physical and mechanical properties of poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) composites embedded with 0-44.0 wt% bismuth trioxide (Bi₂O₃) fabricated by the fast ultraviolet (UV) curing method. The results showed that the addition of Bi₂O₃ had significantly improved the gamma shielding ability of PMMA composites. Mass attenuation coefficient and half-value layer were examined using five gamma sources (Cs-137, Ba-133, Cd-109, Co-57, and Co-60). The high loading of Bi₂O₃ in the PMMA samples improved the micro-hardness to nearly seven times that of the pure PMMA. With these enhancements, it was demonstrated that PMMA/Bi₂O₃ composites are promising gamma shielding materials. Furthermore, the fast UV curing exerts its great potential in significantly shortening the production cycle of shielding material to enable rapid manufacturing.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• 제25권3호
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• pp.63-88
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• 2019

The goal of this paper is to investigate changes in North Korea's domestic and foreign policies through automated text analysis over North Korea represented in South Korean mass media. Based on that data, we then analyze the status of text mining research, using a text mining technique to find the topics, methods, and trends of text mining research. We also investigate the characteristics and method of analysis of the text mining techniques, confirmed by analysis of the data. In this study, R program was used to apply the text mining technique. R program is free software for statistical computing and graphics. Also, Text mining methods allow to highlight the most frequently used keywords in a paragraph of texts. One can create a word cloud, also referred as text cloud or tag cloud. This study proposes a procedure to find meaningful tendencies based on a combination of word cloud, and co-occurrence networks. This study aims to more objectively explore the images of North Korea represented in South Korean newspapers by quantitatively reviewing the patterns of language use related to North Korea from 2016. 11. 1 to 2019. 5. 23 newspaper big data. In this study, we divided into three periods considering recent inter - Korean relations. Before January 1, 2018, it was set as a Before Phase of Peace Building. From January 1, 2018 to February 24, 2019, we have set up a Peace Building Phase. The New Year's message of Kim Jong-un and the Olympics of Pyeong Chang formed an atmosphere of peace on the Korean peninsula. After the Hanoi Pease summit, the third period was the silence of the relationship between North Korea and the United States. Therefore, it was called Depression Phase of Peace Building. This study analyzes news articles related to North Korea of the Korea Press Foundation database(www.bigkinds.or.kr) through text mining, to investigate characteristics of the Kim Jong-un regime's South Korea policy and unification discourse. The main results of this study show that trends in the North Korean national policy agenda can be discovered based on clustering and visualization algorithms. In particular, it examines the changes in the international circumstances, domestic conflicts, the living conditions of North Korea, the South's Aid project for the North, the conflicts of the two Koreas, North Korean nuclear issue, and the North Korean refugee problem through the co-occurrence word analysis. It also offers an analysis of South Korean mentality toward North Korea in terms of the semantic prosody. In the Before Phase of Peace Building, the results of the analysis showed the order of 'Missiles', 'North Korea Nuclear', 'Diplomacy', 'Unification', and ' South-North Korean'. The results of Peace Building Phase are extracted the order of 'Panmunjom', 'Unification', 'North Korea Nuclear', 'Diplomacy', and 'Military'. The results of Depression Phase of Peace Building derived the order of 'North Korea Nuclear', 'North and South Korea', 'Missile', 'State Department', and 'International'. There are 16 words adopted in all three periods. The order is as follows: 'missile', 'North Korea Nuclear', 'Diplomacy', 'Unification', 'North and South Korea', 'Military', 'Kaesong Industrial Complex', 'Defense', 'Sanctions', 'Denuclearization', 'Peace', 'Exchange and Cooperation', and 'South Korea'. We expect that the results of this study will contribute to analyze the trends of news content of North Korea associated with North Korea's provocations. And future research on North Korean trends will be conducted based on the results of this study. We will continue to study the model development for North Korea risk measurement that can anticipate and respond to North Korea's behavior in advance. We expect that the text mining analysis method and the scientific data analysis technique will be applied to North Korea and unification research field. Through these academic studies, I hope to see a lot of studies that make important contributions to the nation.

• Journal of the Korean Professional Engineers Association
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• 제42권3호
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• pp.35-40
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• 2009

After the yield of North Korea conducted underground the first nuclear test in 2006, which was less than a kiloton, it launched a vehicle on this April 9 again, which is believed to be a Taepo-dong 2 missile, defying international warnings that the move would violate U.N. resolutions, from Musudan-ni, North Korea. Its development and proliferation of ballistic missile and nuclear bomb technology pose a threat to the northeast Asian region and to international peace and security. In the other launching the missile, a newspaper reported that "While the launch was dubbed a failure by the U.S., it was an improvement over the North Koreans' July 2006 test of the Taepodong-2, said Green of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It was definitely better than last time, but it's still not an operational system," Green said.

• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
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• 제20권1호
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• pp.111-118
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• 2022

The denuclearization of North Korea was unpredictable and resulted in radical changes. Despite the skepticism and disappointment surrounding denuclearization, it is important for certain verification technologies to establish what is technically possible or practically impossible, and how reliable these technical means are. This article presents the technical hurdles in nuclear verification by systematically categorizing them into issues of correctness and completeness. Moreover, it addresses the safety and security risks during the denuclearization process, including the radiological impact on humans, environmental effects, and the illegal transfer of material, information, and technologies.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
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• 제18권2호
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• pp.51-54
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• 1984

• Strategy21
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• 통권37호
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• pp.32-64
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• 2015

This paper examines the types and trends of North Korea's military provocations and regional maritime threats against South Korea, and is focusing on the Republic of Korea's naval development and modernizations by the Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN) on future actions, what directions of the ROKN has taken thus far in response, as well as an examination of how the ROKN might respond to vulnerabilities identified throughout modern history. Importantly, this paper does not consider the domestic, bilateral, multilateral, regional and global political dimensions of the situation on the Korean Peninsula; nor does it consider the North Korea's transitional power politics, but including North Korea's nuclear program and submarine-launched ballistic missile developments, as a caveat, this paper is based on open sources in Korean and English language, and thus information concerning provocations is indicative only.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• 제16권5호
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• pp.1102-1112
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• 2012

The policy of the United States is a Korean Peninsula free of all nuclear weapons. The United States government was considering the possibility of military action to eliminate the North Korean nuclear threat. Talk of military action peaked from mid-1993 through mid-1994. Such an attack might have led directly to a Korean war. At that time the nuclear crisis solutioned by North Korea-United States negotiation and ROK-United States alliance. PSI's purpose is to prevent or at least inhibit the spread of weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, and related materials to and from states and non-state actors whose possession would be a serious threat to global or regional security. The most controversial activity of PSI is interdiction. North Korea has expressed grave concern over the initiative, stating that it has a sovereign right to develop, deploy, and export weapons, and that it would view any interdiction of its ships as a declaration of war. If South Korea is to execute interdiction North Korean ships expect tensions to increase dramatically on the peninsula with North Korea doing something quite provacative in response. South Korea cannot help approaching PSI with great caution, since it has to consider the ROK-United States alliance, and inter-Korean relations.

• STI Policy Review
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• 제2권3호
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• pp.1-12
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• 2011

North Korea is now under the pressure of international sanctions due to its nuclear tests, firing of long-range ballistic missiles, the sinking of the ROK naval frigate the Cheonan, and the artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island that killed four people. To overcome the burden of sanctions North Korea has exerted various efforts to reconstruct its industries. However, it is very unlikely that these reconstruction efforts would produce significant results due to the structural problems of the antiquated infrastructure of North Korean industries. In the future, it is expected that South Korea will have to cooperate with North Korea for the reconstruction of the North Korean economy after the North Korean nuclear issue will be peacefully resolved. South Korean government has to prepare for the reconstruction with careful planning based on analysis of North Korean industries. But, the number of previous studies that have analyzed the technological level of North Korean industries are quite limited. In preparation for the future inter-Korean industrial cooperation, this study tries to analyze the technological level of North Korean industries. The steel industry has been selected as the focus for the main analysis of this study due to the importance of the steel industry as one of key infrastructure industries. Additionally, this study tests the sustainability of the North Korean steel industry by looking into the possibility of whether the North Korean steel industry can sustain or grow while maintaining global competitiveness in the future when the market opens to the world. Such analysis is expected to contribute to the joint prosperity of two Koreas in the short term and the reduction of unification costs in long term.