I recently posted on the NBR forum a brief statement of the case for Japan renouncing the US Security Pact, joining with Korea (and possibly I'd now add) Vietnam in withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and proposing a new nuclear control regime based on universal mutually assured destruction (MAD). My reply to the criticism it naturally aroused was deemed too offensive to print. Iwonder, if, therefore, your forum which is not dependent on American support, would kindly offer me hospitality and print it. It is a bit long, I'm afraid, but then it is a BIG subject.

First of all I should explain where I am coming from.

I lived (holding my breath) through the Cuban missle crisis, and recall a heated exchange with Bob Scalapino, with me arguing that Kennedy should offer to withdraw American missiles from Turkey and BS saying nonsense, tough it out. In the end Kennedy did withdraw the Turkish missiles but only after he had made Khruschev blink first and lose face. Clever and indeed courageous, but bloody risky.

I also lived through the Reagan-Gorbachev Star Wars meeting in Reykjavik in 1984 (?)Saw how it ended in a general view that ballistic missile defence was a chimaera, and resulted a few years later in the ABM treaty which agreed on a mutual deceleration of expenditure on missile defence and the establishment of the MAD regime which let us all sleep quietly in our beds and wait for the East Germans to desert the Russians and Gorbachev to put his hands up and say "OK, you win"

I have also seen the end of that MAD peace with Bush's renunciation of that ABM treaty, the enthusastic involvement of Japan in plans for a missile defence system, (perceived by the Chinese as an attempt to give America a first strike capacity against China, the low probability of the success of which, the Chinese thought, made it not particularly worrisome) and the simultaneous attempt to involve Poland and Czeck Republic in building a missile-defence system which the much more nervous Russians naturally saw as a move to gain first-strike capabiity against Russia. And I have seen how that has screwed up American Russian relations, and nearly led to a US-Russia armed clash over Georgia.

I have also read, and been persuaded by, the too little noticed book by the American political scientist John Mueller entitled Nuclear Obsession.

The developments of missile defence systems in Europe against Russia (ostensibly against Iran) were protected, as it were, by Jimmy Carter's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which he had got both Russia and China to > agree to. The treaty was shot through from the beginning with double-talk and hypocrisy since US,UK,and France particularly (I'm not sure about the attitude at the time of the other two Permittedly Nuclear-Armed Great Powers, Russia and China) were quite happy to see Israel thumb its nose at the NPT and stay outside, smugly content with its middle eastern monopoly of nuclear weapons. That monopoly was once mildly threatened by Saudi Arabia, was at one time thought, in spite of the clear conclusions of the Blix-led UN inspections teams, to be threatened by Iraq and is now threatened only by Iran. Subsequently the same powers condoned India and Pakistan withdrawing from the treaty, and more recently condoned America's riding a coach and horses through theNPT in its nuclear technology exchange deal with India. That deal, according to tonight's yukan, the Noda government has obediently followed up, cosying up to India by > promising sensitive nuclear technology on the pretext of breaking the Chinese monopoly on rare earths.

The NPT, and the regime it established, with its every-four-year treaty renewal meetings and the preparatory meetings in the intervals, is in miserable shape. Those meetings have recently become so turbulent that only by using up a great deal of diplomatic clout have the Western Powers manage toavoid a complete break-up. The sole current focus of its application is (while giving sound allies like nuclear India access to the latest bomb-also-building
technology) in stopping North Korea from having more, and Iran from having any, nuclear bombs and missiles.

Even fanatical North Koreans and Iranian mullahs know perfectly well that if they tried to send a nuclear missile to a Japanese fishing village or an Israeli Kibbutz, let alone the capitals of those countries, their cities, their states and their civilizations would be immediately devastated. Yet the United States,Israel and Japan use every sanction weapon, including it seems assassinations in the case of Iran, to stop them getting what those states themselves call their nuclear deterrent -- their hypothetical possibility of destroying, Tokyo, Tel Aviv or New York inretaliation for an attack.

Also more footling sanctions than assassinations. When I went to my Japanese bank to transfer my hard-earned over-priced yen into a sensible currency the other day, the form declared that the only two countries in the world to which I could not send money were North Korea, as of several years ago, and Iran, as of last April.

It is a mad world, and, as Mueller argues, it's obsession with nuclear weapons is one of its maddest aspects. (Equally mad the current Japanese obsession with banning nuclear power generation for all time.)

An obvious recipe for a more stable international regime is to let NPT disappear into oblivion and replace it with a new Nuclear Weapon Control system to which even Israel can be pressured into joining -- a system based on universal MAD, the certain promise that any country which uses nuclear weapons will face massive retaliation and probable destruction.

Japan with its Hiroshima/Nagasaki victim badge of honour is uniquely placed to propose a worked-out-in-detail draft treaty to establish such a regime.

In doing so, the break with the United States would of course be traumatic, coinciding as it probably would with the declaration not only of withdrawal from the NPT but also the intention to build a nuclear deterrent.

And about time too. All it needs is a politician with the instincts of a Hatoyama and the guts of an Ozawa or a Nakasone. Has anybody got any idea as to where such a phenomenal Japanese leader might be coming from?
Certainly not from among the graduates of the Matsushita Seikei Juku which produced Noda and Maehara.

Ronald Dore