ABSTRACT
The leaders of the two nuclear superpowers are beginning to acknowledge the necessity for alternative security systems to those based on nuclear overkill, mutual threat and mistrust. When Olaf Palme’s Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues first coined the concept of common security in the relatively dark days of 1981-1982, United States’ defense expenditure was booming and relations between the superpowers were stagnant or deteriorating. From the perspective of most states in the Asia-Pacific Region, common security both as a vision and as a doctrine guiding specific national defense policies seems very Eurocentric. For non-nuclear states such as New Zealand the success of common security nationally and regionally hinges on adhering unswervingly to a vision of a world beyond minimal nuclear deterrence. In the North-East Pacific, for example, the Soviet Union and Japan have an unresolved territorial dispute in relation to the occupied islands of Etorofu and Kunashiri in the Kurile group.
