Japanese Leaders Provoke China by Daring for the First Time To Talk About Nuclear Weapons

Suddenly the word ‘nuclear’ is on the lips of Japanese leaders — and Communist China is alarmed.China’s foreign ministry spokesman, Guo Jiakun, lectured the Japanese against using the forbidden word after Japan’s defense minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, dared to say it’s time for Japan to drop the ‘taboo’ against raising the nuclear issue.Mr. Guo was blunt, as China’s English-language party newspaper Global Times reported. The issue of “whether Japan possesses nuclear weapons is not a matter for the Japanese side to discuss as it wishes,” he said.In fact, Global Times reported, Mr. Koizumi’s remarks “constitute a serious provocation against and flagrant violation of the NPT (nuclear non-proliferation treaty) and the post-World War II international order.”What exactly did Mr. Koizumi say to provoke the Chinese? “Japan must possess the capabilities to firmly counter threats directed at us,” the Japan Times quoted him as proclaiming on a TV news program. “Within that context, decisions are being made without any taboos.”Well aware of the sensitivities of memories of imperial Japan’s rule of much of China before and during World War II and the atomic bombing by the Americans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Mr. Koizumi asked how Japanese could avoid “discussing things it doesn’t want to discuss.” Japan, he told reporters, “must possess the capabilities to firmly counter threats directed at us.”With those words, the government of Prime Minister Sanai Takaichi has moved a significant step to breaking the inhibition against so much as hinting at developing a nuclear warhead. Never has a top Japanese official been so bold as to hint at such a possibility – or even use the word “nuclear” as applied to defense.In Beijing, Mr. Guo noted that Ms. Takaichi had stated her adherence to all the NPT dictates — “not accepting, not manufacturing, not possessing and not proliferating nuclear weapons. These “inescapable international legal obligations.” he said, left “no room for bargaining.”By raising the nuclear topic, Mr. Koizumi deepened festering differences with China that have worsened relations ever since Ms. Takaichi last November said that any attempt by the Chinese to take over Free China, or Taiwan, would create a “survival threatening situation” for Japan.The inference was that Japan was willing to go to war for the island province, which Japan ruled for half a century from 1895, when it defeated the Chinese, to 1945, when it surrendered at the end of World War II. The Communist regime in Beijing has never governed Taiwan, held by the anti-Communist “Nationalist forces” of Chiang Kai-shek.The Chinese, however, are not alone in their response to mention of Japan’s emergence as a nuclear power. Mr. Koizumi in July upset survivors of the atomic bombings when he remarked, in an interview with a conservative commentator, Yoshiko Sakurai, that the Japanese had to talk about the nuclear issue “without taboos.”“It is a difficult problem to discuss, but one problem we cannot avoid addressing is the nuclear issue,” Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s major national newspapers, quoted him as saying, “We must discuss all policies without taboos.”The Chinese did not react at the time, but the leader of an anti-nuclear organization in Nagasaki, Masao Tomonaga, declared, “Such remarks at a time when international norms governing nuclear weapons are eroding reveals his shallow understanding of the issue.”Japan is also showing other signs of dropping constraints against nukes, including both nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered warships. Mr. Koizumi cited the case of Finland as amending its laws against allied countries basing nuclear weapons within its borders, and he noted talk in France of spreading its “nuclear umbrella” over Europe.The right-wing Japan Innovation Party, a junior member of the coalition needed to support Ms. Takaichi, has warned that nuclear subs, hitherto banned, are also needed to counter China’s growing power in the Pacific.

Japanese Leaders Provoke China by Daring for the First Time To Talk About Nuclear Weapons

Japanese Leaders Provoke China by Daring for the First Time To Talk About Nuclear Weapons

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