PACIFISM AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS DON’T MIX. Just look at Japan. In October 1999, when Liberal vice defense minister Shingo Nishimura casually remarked that Tokyo should consider going nuclear, his colleagues nearly choked. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi rebuked him, as did Liberal party boss Ichiro Ozawa, a famous security hawk. There were red faces all around, and Nishimura was promptly sacked.
But a lot can change in three years. During the spring of 2002, Japan’s deputy chief cabinet secretary, Shinzo Abe, claimed it was “not necessarily unconstitutional” for Tokyo to deploy tactical nukes in its own defense. This made headlines, but Abe kept his job. Indeed, his direct superior, the more moderate Yasuo Fukuda, affirmed that a “review” of Japan’s three-decade-old anti-nuclear policy might soon be in order. Such comments were no longer anathema–thanks, above all, to Kim Jong Il.
As the Economist put it, Japanese foreign policy had begun shifting from pacifism to populism. Small wonder: How could any neighbor of missile-mad North Korea, whatever its history, behave like strict Quakers? Japan was already working with America to develop a missile defense shield. When Pyongyang laid bare its nuclear ambitions in October 2002, talk of a regional arms race began to swirl. Suddenly a nuclear Japan didn’t seem quite so implausible.
AFTER THE MOST RECENT North Korean mischief, the question is more germane than ever: Will the Japanese seriously debate going nuclear? A raft of evidence would seem to suggest so. For one thing, the hawkish Abe is now prime minister. This past summer, when North Korea launched several missiles into the Sea of Japan, he said that Tokyo should expand discussion of a preemptive strike capability–which, according to Abe, passed constitutional muster.
Then, last month, Yasuhiro Nakasone, who served as prime minister from 1982 to 1987, told the Australian that Japanese nukes might be needed should the U.S. security umbrella ever prove tenuous. “Whether or not the U.S. will maintain the same attitude is unpredictable,” said the 88-year-old Nakasone. “There is a need to study the option of nuclear weapons.” He made those remarks prior to North Korea’s latest provocation. “Nakasone does not advocate acquiring nuclear weapons,” stressed the Australian correspondent, “but says [Japan] must study the possibility.”
Yet when Pyongyang conducted its first nuclear test, Prime Minister Abe struck a different note. “We have no intention of changing our policy that possessing nuclear weapons is not our option,” he told the Japanese parliament on October 10th. “There will be no change in our non-nuclear arms principles. We want to seek a solution through peaceful and diplomatic means.”
Abe had to reiterate these comments on October 16th, a day after Shoichi Nakagawa, policy chief of the ruling Liberal Democratic party, said that a nuclear debate should be actively pursued. Speaking to reporters in Tokyo, Abe rejected such a debate, affirming that Japan’s three anti-nuclear principles–banning the “possession, production, and presence” of nuclear weapons on Japanese soil–would not be altered.
Talk of a “nuclear Japan” is thus premature. Those who have sounded off against the idea, such as former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, can rest easy, for now. “I think it’s very unlikely,” says Michael Green, a senior National Security Council official from 2001 to 2005. “That taboo is still very strong,” both “among the general population and among the conservative leadership.”
Indeed, the Japanese still harbor their widespread nuclear “allergy,” an enduring consequence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his richly textured “reinterpretation” of modern Japan, published in the late 1990s, veteran journalist Patrick Smith wrote that “keeping Japan free of nuclear weapons is a near obsession among all Japanese.” No doubt those attitudes may have softened in recent years, as the North Korean threat metastasized. But in private conversations with Japanese diplomats and scholars, I am always struck by their dismissal of the nuclear option.
Americans–especially American conservatives–should keep this in mind. Conservatives often speak of a nuclear Japan as if it were a real and perhaps even desirable prospect. In a recent New York Times op-ed, written after the first North Korean nuclear explosion, David Frum urged the Bush administration to “encourage Japan to renounce the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent.” As Frum explained, “Not only would the nuclearization of Japan be a punishment of China and North Korea, but it would go far to meet our goal of dissuading Iran–it would show Tehran that the United States and its friends will aggressively seek to correct any attempt by rogue states to unsettle any regional nuclear balance.”
But from a U.S. perspective, nuclear weapons might also make Japan a much more difficult alliance partner. According to Kurt Campbell, who served as deputy assistant secretary of Defense under President Clinton, the notion that a nuclear Japan is somehow in America’s interest ranks “among the most foolish strategic fallacies ever.” It would spark a “cascading” effect throughout East Asia, says Campbell, and fundamentally change the U.S. alliance system. To obviate this scenario, the Pentagon should “profoundly” reassure Japan over its security guarantees.
What Tokyo may do is revisit Article 9 of its pacifist constitution and figure out how to play a more “normal” role in multilateral security networks. This process gained steam under Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who stepped down last month after more than five years in office. Like Koizumi, Abe believes in loosening the legal shackles that prevent Japan from engaging in collective self-defense and have hindered U.S.-Japan collaboration on missile defense. He may also seek to boost Japan’s military budget, which has traditionally been capped at an artificially low percentage.
“The land-attack capabilities of its air force are extremely limited,” says James Kelly, who served as assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs from 2001 to 2005. “Its submarine force is absolutely first-rate.” Kelly doubts that the Japanese will soon go nuclear because, quite simply, “they don’t need to at this time.” He says that a nuclear Japan presupposes “a serious loss of confidence in the U.S. alliance.”
Fortifying that confidence was one motive behind Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s trip to Tokyo this week. Under the stewardship of Bush and Koizumi, the alliance reached historic levels of strategic cooperation. At the end of the day, maintaining the health and reciprocity of that alliance is the best guarantor against a nuclear Japan.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
