East Asian Studies: Data and Primary Sources

This collection pulls together more than 2,000 primary source documents detailing the relationship between the United States and Japan during the formative years of their modern alliance. The documents, most of which appear here for the first time, include records of historic U.S.-Japanese summit meetings; communications between heads of state; top-level internal deliberations, including Nixon and Kissinger memoranda of conversation; memos, cables and studies concerning U.S. diplomatic relations with Japan; records concerning the U.S.-Japan security relationship; documents related to trade and international monetary relations with Japan; and intelligence estimates and studies concerning Japan's foreign policy objectives, military capabilities, economic policies and internal situation.

Japan and the United States: Diplomatic, Security, and Economic Relations, Part II: 1977–1992 is the most important compilation of documents publicly available on relations between the United States and Japan during the Carter, Reagan and Bush I presidencies. This was the period when the Cold War drew to a close and U.S. policy-makers strove to develop a new global strategy. Incorporating the latest U.S. government releases, obtained largely through the Freedom of Information Act, this collection significantly enriches the historical record. White House, State Department, Pentagon, Commerce Department, CIA and other documents, virtually all of them previously classified, cover all the major issues from this critical period, including high-level diplomatic, military and economic relations. Topics covered in detail include summit meetings during all three presidential administrations, U.S. objectives in major trade negotiations on such items as automobiles and semiconductors, the Structural Dialogue talks on trade, U.S. efforts to guide Japanese defense policy, and the impact of the first Persian Gulf conflict on U.S.-Japan relations.

This collection pulls together more than 2,000 documents concerning the relationship between the United States and China, with an emphasis on the 1969–1998 time period. The documents include memos, cables, and studies concerning U.S. diplomatic relations with China, records concerning the U.S.-PRC security relationship, documents related to the economic and scientific association with the PRC, and intelligence estimates and studies concerning the PRC's foreign policy objectives, military capabilities

Containing over 2,000 documents that total more than 14,000 pages, Afghanistan offers a comprehensive record of the bloodiest and costliest superpower proxy war of the 1980s. Documents include State Department cables from Kabul, Washington, D.C., and Islamabad.

The National Security Archive's collection on U.S.-Korean relations covers both diplomatic, security, and economic relations between the United States and its ally, South Korea; and the challenges to the U.S. posed by an adversarial North Korea. It spans events dating from the Nixon administration's response to the April 15, 1969 downing, by North Korean MiG-17s, of a U.S. EC-121 reconnaissance plane over the Sea of Japan, to efforts during the Clinton years to deter Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions. The collection contains approximately 1,800 records documents released by the State Department, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other agencies, as well as historical material compiled through research at the National Archives and the presidential libraries. The many newly-declassified documents in the set deal with a wide range of significant themes and events. These include detailed contingency plans for military strikes against North Korea in response to the EC-121 incident; growing concern over North Korea's economic instability; the leadership transition from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang; political liberalization in South Korea (from the Kwangju uprising to the election of Kim Dae Jung); a historic summit meeting between the leaders of South and North Korea in 2000, and secret discussions with other powers, including Japan, China and Russia, aimed at coordinating an international diplomatic response to North Korea's threat to regional security.