In recent years, "anti-American" sentiments and protests - what some observers regard as the "wildcard" in the US-Korea alliance-- have created tensions in the management of the bilateral relationship. Analysts have pointed to nationalism, the South's newfound "love" for the North, and generational change among South Koreans as key explanations for the anti-Americanism. Katharine Moon offers a different kind of analysis, focusing on the rapid changes in democratization and decentralization of government that have fostered a new identity and activist role for local governments and citizens. Local autonomy, especially in the areas housing the U.S. military bases, has come to challenge the monopoly of the central government in managing the alliance relationship and a powerful force shaping the politics of anti-Americanism.

Katharine H.S. Moon, associate professor and chairperson, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College, and a non-resident scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, George Washington University.

She is the author of Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (Columbia University, 1997; Korean edition by Sam-in Publishing Co., 2002) and other work on women and international relations, migrant workers, and social movements in East Asia. Currently, she is writing a book on "anti-Americanism" in Korea-U.S. relations from the perspective of Korea's democratization and the politics of social movements. Moon received a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in 2002 to conduct research in Korea and was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the George Washington University in 2002-03.

Katharine Moon has served in the Office of the Senior Coordinator for Women's Issues in the U.S. Department of State and as a trustee of Smith College. She serves on the editorial board of several journals of international relations and consults for NGOs in the U.S. and Korea. She also serves on policy task forces designed to examine current U.S. - Korea relations.

For almost 20 years the Energy Department has been investigating and developing Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the site for a deep underground repository to accept spent fuel from all the power reactors and high level waste left over from bomb programs. The future of US nuclear energy is widely thought to be tied to the success of the project. In 2002 Congress gave DOE the green light to take the next step to submit an NRC license application demonstrating compliance with applicable standards. DOE promised such an application in December 2004. It delayed and delayed and now DOE no longer has a date for submitting an NRC application, but it will be no earlier than 2008.

What's holding it up? What is the history of the project? What are its technical and managerial and legal problems? What has been the effect of Nevada's opposition? How will recent project changes and the administration's new nuclear policy (GNEP) affect Yucca Mountain? What are the prospects for project licensing and completion? Is Yucca Mountain the only option for dealing with the country's spent fuel?

Dr. Victor Gilinsky is a Washington, D.C.-based consultant on energy. He has been active on proliferation issues for many years, going back to his early work at RAND in Santa Monica, California. He joined RAND soon after receiving a PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1961. In 1971 he moved to the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C., where he was assistant director for policy and program review. From 1973 to 1975, he was head of the RAND Physical Sciences Department. From 1975 to 1984, he served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), having been appointed by President Gerald Ford and reappointed by President Jimmy Carter. During his NRC tenure, Dr Gilinsky was heavily involved in nuclear-export issues. In 1982 he received Caltech's Distinguished Alumnus Award.

The nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula is one of the greatest challenges facing the global non-proliferation system. Yet the very root of that issue reaches far beyond the non-proliferation system. The Six-Party Talks, involving North Korea, South Korea, the United States, Russia, Japan, and China, bring hope for a peaceful solution between these nations. However, the continued strategic mistrust between the United States and North Korea casts an uncertain light on the struggling negotiations. Yang Xiyu will speak about the challenges of the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, the profound mutual mistrust between the US and North Korea, and China's role in the Six-Party Talks. He will also discuss a possible solution.

Before coming to Shorenstein APARC as a visiting scholar, Yang Xiyu was Director of the Office for the Korean Peninsula Issues in Chinese Foreign Ministry. The office was set up in January 2004, when Dr. Yang was its first director to deal with the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, as well as, affairs relating to the Six-Party Talks. He began his involvement in issues related to the Korean Peninsula in 1994, when he worked in the Chinese Embassy in the United States. During the following years, he took part in the launch of the Four-Party Talks, and was the representative for the Chinese side in the working level meeting of the talks, as well as, a member of the Chinese Delegation in the Four-Party Talks that were held in New York and Geneva.

He was awarded the National Award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Science Studies by the State Council of China, and the Honorable Allowance for National Distinguished Experts.

One of the fundamental challenges facing the United States Department of Homeland Security is the determination of what is critical in critical infrastructure systems such as water, Internet, power, energy, and transportation. Current practice is focused on single-point security audits of things like power plants, airport terminals, and refineries. But this approach does not identify the most vital components of any infrastructure which leads to an inadequate strategy and wasted funding. We show that single-point audits lead to the wrong conclusions and do not provide sufficient national security relative to the effort and money being spent. Instead, we propose an approach similar to social network analysis whereby a critical infrastructure is modeled as a network and then analyzed to identify the critical nodes and links. We present models and software to analyze such networks to obtain optimal resource allocation such that network risk is minimized. In the parlance of network science, our approach extends the theory of scale free networks to incorporate damage estimates for nodes and links. By exploiting the structure inherent in a network, we are able to allocate resources in the most optimal manner, which leads to a fundamentally different strategy than currently practiced.

Rudolph Darken is the Director of the Institute for Modeling, and Simulation (MOVES) and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is the Chair of the MOVES Curriculum Committee and is also the Associate Director for Research for the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His personal research has been primarily focused on human factors and training using virtual environments and computer gaming media with emphasis on navigation and wayfinding in large-scale virtual worlds. He is a Senior Editor of PRESENCE Journal, the MIT Press journal of teleoperators and virtual environments. He received his B.S. in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1990 and his M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from The George Washington University in 1993 and 1995, respectively.

Ted Lewis is Professor of Computer Science and Academic Associate of the Homeland Security curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School. He served as Sr. Vice President of Eastman Kodak Company, President and CEO of DaimlerChrysler Research, North America, Editor-in-Chief (twice) of IEEE Computer magazine and IEEE Software magazine, and has authored more than 100 papers and 30 books over the past 35 years on subjects ranging from software engineering, parallel processing, to hi-tech business. Currently, he teaches the Critical Infrastructure Protection course at NPS and does research in the application of network science to strategy and policy questions for the US Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Lewis' textbook, "Critical Infrastructure Protection in Homeland Security: Defending a Networked Nation" will be published by John Wiley & Sons, in April 2006.