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| China-Japan-Koreas | ||
| U.S warns of Asian nuclear arms race | ||
| 2005-06-03 | ||
| The development of a nuclear weapon by North Korea would put pressure on Japan and South Korea to consider building their own nuclear arsenals, the U.S. ambassador to Japan said Friday. Ambassador Thomas Schieffer told reporters at his residence in Tokyo that if North Korea were to test an atomic bomb, the strategic balance in the region would be changed. "If you had a nuclear North Korea, it just introduces a whole different dynamic," Schieffer said. "It seems to me that that increases the pressure on both South Korea and Japan to consider going nuclear themselves."
The United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea are urging the North to return to six-party talks that are intended to persuade it to give up its nuclear weapons programs. The talks were last held in June 2004. Since then, the North has stayed away from the table, citing a "hostile" U.S. policy, and it claimed in February that it had nuclear weapons. Speculation has mounted that it is preparing for a nuclear test. Schieffer, in a wide-ranging discussion with a small group of reporters, said that getting North Korea back to the six-party talks would be just the beginning of a long process of persuading the isolated nation to give up its nuclear weapons programs. "We have to be very careful that getting North Korea back to the table does not become an end in itself," he said. "The six- party talks were meant to resolve a thorny issue - they weren't meant to be just an opportunity to talk about it endlessly and achieve nothing."
Japan bars nuclear weapons from its territory, and talk of developing its own nuclear deterrent has long been considered among the nation's taboo subjects. The world's only atomic-bombed nation remains under a U.S. security shield. "It is possible," Shigeru Ishiba, a former Japanese minister for defense, warned in a recent television talk show, "for one country after another to follow North Korea's example in possessing nukes. Japan will never do so." But a North Korean nuclear test could change the thinking on this question, some analysts believe. The possibility that the North is preparing a test has already begun to fuel Tokyo debate as to whether Japan should go nuclear itself. Analysts forecast that Japan would at least step up its military ties with the United States, especially the development of an antimissile system begun after North Korea's launching of a long-range missile over the main Japanese island in 1998. As a key U.S. ally, Japan has begun to cast off its pacifist mantle by sending troops on a noncombat mission to Iraq, its first military deployment since World War II in a country at war. Vice President Dick Cheney and other U.S. conservatives have warned that the failure to end North Korea's nuclear ambitions could trigger an arms race in East Asia involving Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. All of them might be capable of producing nuclear weapons. But for the moment, however, a nuclear-armed Japan is widely seen at home as unrealistic, so long as Tokyo maintains a 1967 policy against the production, possession or presence of nuclear weapons in its territory. Cheney's warning "may have been used as a diplomatic card against China and belonged to the world of rhetoric," said Hideya Kurata, a professor of security affairs at Tokyo's Kyorin University. In a May 19 report, the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee said: "A test in North Korea would certainly raise the prospect of a major public debate in Japan over whether to turn its latent nuclear capabilities in its civilian and space sectors into an overt nuclear weapons program." The policy paper called on Washington to demand that Beijing, the main patron of the North, "make a choice: either help out or face the possibility of other nuclear neighbors." Japan has an ample stockpile of plutonium derived by reprocessing spent fuel from the country's 52 nuclear reactors with a total capacity of 45 million kilowatts. Japan has the technical capacity to produce nuclear bombs and mount them on missiles "within 90 days," said Kenichi Ohmae, a Japanese consultant on management and sociopolitical issues. In an interview with South Korea's JoongAng Ilbo newspaper in February, he estimated the stockpile at more than 50 tons, enough to make 2,000 plutonium bombs. Japan also has a space rocket that could double as an intercontinental ballistic missile. Ohmae said that 90 percent of the Japanese were opposed to nuclear armament. "But I believe that public opinion will rapidly change if we are faced with the real threat of North Korean nuclear arms," he said. On the other side of the debate, Hideshi Takesada,a professor at Japan's National Institute for Defense Studies, ruled out a nuclear chain reaction in East Asia. "South Korea has come to consider North Korean nuclear weapons more as a bargaining chip and less as a military means," he said. Japan has been seeking to "strengthen the credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella and jointly develop a defense system," he said. Takesada said that President George W. Bush would never tolerate nuclear armament for Taiwan at a time when a cross-Strait military clash with mainland China looms as a possibility. Scott Snyder, a senior associate at the Asia Foundation and an expert on Korean affairs, said that Japanese or South Korean commitments to remain nonnuclear would probably depend "on the quality and satisfaction that exists with the U.S. alliance system." "While there may not be an immediate chain reaction," he said, "this does mean that we need to put the alliances and their durability under greater scrutiny." South Korea has never clarified what it would do if North Korea were to refuse to abandon its nuclear weapons development and declare itself a nuclear power by testing a bomb. In the 1970s, the then government of South Korea's military strongman, Park Chung Hee, edged the country toward a nuclear weapons program. The country has since publicly renounced any nuclear arms ambitions. But in a revelation that prompted an international uproar, South Korea acknowledged last year that it had conducted a plutonium-based nuclear experiment more than 20 years ago and a uranium-enrichment experiment four years ago. Plutonium and enriched uranium are two key ingredients of nuclear weapons. South Korea has since denied any ambition to possess nuclear arms - a denial later accepted by the International Atomic Energy Agency. "A nuclear North Korea could trigger the worst arms race in the region," Kim Tae Woo, an analyst at Seoul's Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, said in May. He said the arms race could also prompt Taiwan to go nuclear. Such a scenario is one of the biggest reasons that experts believe that China would not tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea. Japan's Kyodo news agency, citing U.S. government sources, reported Thursday that China had warned North Korea that it would have to consider stopping food aid if it carried out a nuclear test. In May, Dan Fata, Republican Party policy director for national security and trade, wrote: "The key to preventing a nuclear test lies primarily with China." | ||
| Posted by:Steve |
| #3 Why on earth would Beijing even consider that? They are milking the current situation -- which they created -- for all it's worth. |
| Posted by: seriously annoyed 2005-06-03 18:40 |
| #2 It would be interesting to announce that we were interested in beginning bilateral talks on the future of NK .... with China. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2005-06-03 16:17 |
| #1 Japan has the technical capacity to produce nuclear bombs and mount them on missiles "within 90 days," I have no doubt, though I'll wager they're tacking on at least a month. |
| Posted by: JerseyMike 2005-06-03 15:18 |