Japan avoids nuclear option amid threats

By Jonathan Power

TOKYO (JP): The heated controversy still continuing in Washington over Congress' decision in June to reduce the Administration's request from US$25 million to $15 million to fulfill its obligations in the cash-for-canning-nuclear-arms deal with North Korea, has recharged Japan's own vigorous ongoing debate.

Does the threat that North Korea posed a short three years ago, attempting, as many observers saw it, to build its own nuclear arsenal with rockets to match, alter Japan's traditional pacifist posture on nuclear arms and puts it to develop a military establishment comparable to its economic power?

Japan, after all, is not just one of the neighboring powers most affected by potential instability on the Korean peninsula, it has often been the subject of direct threats from North Korea and falls within the range of its new No-dong 1 missile (and the No-dong 2 under development).

What really is going on in the Japanese political and military establishment? Has it decided to build up a stock of plutonium ready to build nuclear weapons if need dictates, as its regular shipments of reprocessed nuclear fuel from Britain and France suggest?

Or is it, in quite the reverse mode, falling back on its traditional reliance on the U.S., exhibiting the passivity for which, since its defeat in World War II, it has become famous?

Indeed this docility that refuses to rock any boat so irritated Joseph Nye, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs on his visit to Tokyo last summer he exclaimed, "If I were located where Japan is, with a neighbor like North Korea that is developing ballistic missiles...I would take Theater Missile Defense more seriously."

The fact is senior Japanese policy makers appear to doubt the common American opinion that North Korea's missiles are sophisticated and powerful enough to carry nuclear weapons. And although some prominent policy makers have said they believe that North Korea had acquired sufficient plutonium to build a couple of nuclear weapons and was about to build more -- at least until the agreement brokered by ex-President Jimmy Carter -- others have said they don't think North Korea succeeded in acquiring a bomb, even though they concede it was hell-bent on making one.

Nevertheless, what is of universal concern here is that North Korea is capable of using its missiles to attack Japan with high- explosive warheads or even chemical weapons. But again the Japanese are careful not to overstate their fears. Chemical weapons are inaccurate and dependent on favorable environmental conditions.

It's estimated that to have the impact of a Hiroshima-size bomb, it would need 75 chemical-tipped missiles over the target area, well beyond the capabilities of the No-dong 2. On the other hand no one underestimates, after the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway last year by the Aum Shinriko cult, the ability of such weapons to produce serious panic.

Yet while most of the inside opinion makers in Tokyo appear to play down the military security threat for the short term, they appear to believe that the North Korean political threat is a real one -- North Korea has succeeded with its nuclear (real or imagined) brinkmanship in sowing some doubts about the stability of the U.S. security system in Northeast Asia.

This has pushed Japan both to willingly take on its share of the bribe now being paid to North Korea to put a halt to its nuclear bomb program by paying a hefty share of its new (weapons- safe) light-water nuclear reactors and to strengthen its security links with the U.S. At the same time it has decided to take some initiatives of its own, in particular encouraging China to use its influence in Pyongyang. Japan believes that China, more than anyone, can moderate North Korean bellicosity.

The Chinese link is convenient. It helps Japan portray its closer military ties with Washington as not anti-Beijing but only anti-Pyongyang. But, of course, for Tokyo the real long-term worry is the growth of Chinese military might.

Even so neither the current, if reduced, threat from Pyongyang nor a possible future threat from Beijing have persuaded Tokyo to develop its own nuclear option. For the moment, despite the difficulties, Japanese policy makers do not feel they have exhausted the diplomatic, economic and military options for dealing with either threat.

Nevertheless, if Japan ever felt pushed to the wall by either North Korea or China or by a waning of the U.S. strategic commitment, it could, if it chose, quickly develop a high class nuclear arsenal. No one should have any doubts about that, even if it's the last thing the Japanese want to do.