hankyoreh

By Jeong Nam-ku, Tokyo correspondent

A Japan with an army and nuclear weapons. This has long been the dream of the country's conservatives - and now they have a good opportunity to make it come true, with a cash-strapped Washington asking Tokyo to play a more active role in Northeast Asian security. Prime minister Shinzo Abe has been using tensions with China over the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands as an excuse to amend the Constitution and allow the country to have a national guard. Constitutional restrictions on the use of military force are disappearing bit by bit.

If given enough of an excuse, Japan could arm itself with nuclear weapons in no time at all. It already has 30 tons of plutonium, having earned permission from the US to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. It also has superior transportation technology. While it isn't clear whether it has the reentry technology needed to operate intercontinental ballistic missiles, its rocket technology is second to none.

North Korea's third nuclear test on Feb. 12 prompted open calls for nuclear armament from Japan's conservatives. Shintaro Ishihara, head of the Japan Restoration Party, made oblique reference to this before the House of Representatives, mentioning a previous debate over Japan's need to conduct nuclear tests and saying that the country "needs a system in place to protect itself."

Meanwhile, South Korea is seeing its own calls for nuclear armament. Chung Mong-joon, a Saenuri Party (NFP) lawmaker who once called for reexamining the return of US tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea, is now saying the country needs its own nuclear deterrent. "If North Korea arms itself with nuclear weapons," he argued, "we need to convince the US that we have to have a minimal self-defense capability ourselves." Hwang Woo-yea, the chairman of the Saenuri Party, said in a Feb. 15 radio address that South Korea "needs to restore the military balance with a system to respond to asymmetrical nuclear weapons."

Japan's conservatives couldn't be happier about this turn of events. The Sankei Shimbun, a major conservative daily, ran a front-page story on Feb. 15 on the calls for nuclear armament coming from South Korea. In their eyes, this provides an even better rationale for Japan's own armament than North Korea's nuclear program. But we are the ones who are most vulnerable to the threat of nuclear war, the ones who stand to pay the steepest price if the countries of the region get caught up in a nuclear arms race. We must not approach this like little kids playing war games.

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