How did North Korea do on its recent nuclear test? They bombed.
But only a little. Something radioactive did go off, and international norms were certainly violated, so North Korea doesn’t get an “F” on its test. It gets a “D” for “dangerous,” and there’s little doubt that with a little effort, North Korea could ratchet up a grade or two. It’s tempting to label US President George W. Bush’s latest lapse on North Korea just another humongous foreign policy failure.
But is it? Letting the Carter and Clinton presidencies’ diplomatic initiatives toward North Korea languish for six years may not be accidental. Does Bush’s dream of a century-long global war on terror include arming Japan with nuclear weapons?
In 2003 as the US’ Iraq war was getting underway, North Korea audaciously tested some missiles. US Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly suggested that a nuclear-armed North Korea might “force” Japan “to consider whether or not they want to readdress the nuclear question.”
Japan is already a “para-nuclear weapons state.” During World War II, it had an active nuclear weapons program, including scientists trained by Albert Einstein. Today, Japan has an extensive nuclear energy program possessing so much plutonium that “it would,” observed Japan’s Liberal Party President Ichiro Ozama in 2002, “be easy for us to produce...several thousand (nuclear) warheads.” Noting that an “inflated” China would cause the “Japanese people (to) get hysterical,” Ozama warned: “If we get serious, we (Japan) will never be beaten in terms of military power.”
While some protest that Japan’s postwar constitution prohibits nuclear weapons, Japanese officials contend they are permissible for self-defense. And under the Bush doctrine of “anticipatory” self-defense, the door to Japan acquiring nuclear weapons seems wide open.
America protects Japan by its nuclear umbrella. But can America, whose forces are now stretched so thinly across the Middle East with such poor results, defend Japan from genuine geographical enemies like Russia, China, and the Koreas when it can’t even defend itself from a handful of Al- Qaedistas and Talebaners without incurring catastrophe after catastrophe?
Allowing Japan to go nuclear is an option that might buy the West time to finish things in the Middle East. But much about Japan challenges the wisdom of this. There’s a Japan nobody really knows.
Bush enjoyed Japan’s then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s Elvis impersonations. But Koizumi marked the anniversary of Japan’s ignominious World War II surrender by placing chrysanthemums — symbols of imperial Japan — and bowing at the controversial Yasukuni shrine honoring war criminals, harkening back to the days when Japanese venerated their emperor.
Thirty years ago, Yukio Mishima, Japan’s brilliant writer, became a pro-militarist fanatic and, obsessed with emperor-loyalty, seized Japan’s military headquarters with his private army. He then disemboweled himself as his homosexual lover endeavored to decapitate him with a samurai sword. Investigators later determined that Mishima’s men had all planned to commit ritual suicide, and only at the last minute did Mishima limit this to himself and his companion.
Japanese doomsday cultists Aum Shinrikyo remain the world’s only known civilian group to manufacture deadly sarin gas and use it to murder indiscriminately, killing 7 and injuring over 500 people in one 1994 attack on a Matsumoto hotel-office complex, and more infamously in the 1995 Tokyo subway attacks, killing 12 and injuring 5,000. The Japanese government refuses to outlaw the group, and so Aum still recruits followers. Nor has the Japanese government ever adequately explained Aum’s 1990-95 attempts to use anthrax and botulism to kill millions, including attacking US naval bases in Japan — attacks which failed only because of chemical impurities. Nor are Japanese extremists strangers to Middle Eastern politics. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese nihilist-leftists terrorized the world as the Japanese Red Army (JRA), lobbing mortar attacks on US, Canadian, and British embassies; bombing corporations’ headquarters; hijacking and suicidally crashing planes full of passengers; seizing France’s Netherlands Embassy and holding its ambassador and employees at gunpoint; and most infamously, the 1972 Lod massacre at Tel Aviv’s airport where Japanese terrorists used machine guns and grenades to kill 26 and injure 80 before two JRA killed themselves with grenades — a first example subsequently followed by Middle East suicide bombers.
Has democracy taken root in Japan? It’s hard to say. They have elections, yet anachronisms remain. Japan has had long periods of one-party rule. Its treatment of minorities is internationally criticized. And recently, in rejecting the female child born of its crown prince and princess as unentitled to assume the Chrysanthemum throne in favor of a newborn male nephew, Japan heralds it is more concerned with ancient dynasty than modern democracy.
Can Japan be trusted with nuclear weapons? Since it has enough plutonium to make a nice mushroom cloud within the next six months (if it doesn’t have one already), the question is moot.
The only real question is whether we’re ready.
