Asia's Nuclear FutureH by William H Overholt

Author:William H Overholt [Overholt, William H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, World, Asian, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780429746536
Google: NKubDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 50771004
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Japan

The possibility that Japan would eventually acquire nuclear weapons has received extraordinarily intense attention.11 I shall not attempt in the brief space available here to review systematically the overwhelming evidence on the following points. The Japanese government is sincere about its principles of nonproduction, nonpossession, and nonintroduction of nuclear weapons. The political and legal constraints against Japanese nuclear armament, including public opinion, the Constitution, the views of all three major non-Communist parties, and the vulnerability of the governing Liberal Democratic Party on this issue, are currently insuperable. Strategically, acquisition of nuclear weapons would make Japan for the first time a nuclear target totally vulnerable because of Japan's compact geography, without giving Japan comparable effectiveness against the dispersed populations of the PRC and USSR. World opinion, U.S. pressures, Southeast Asian fears, and potential PRC and USSR responses all deter nuclear rearmament. Finally, the Japanese have proved their sincerity by signing the NPT, and inspection procedures under the treaty make covert acquisition of nuclear weapons very difficult.

It is true that Japanese insecurity is growing because of declining U.S. presence and rising PRC and USSR power; that discussion of nuclear weapons has become socially permissible in key Japanese circles; that Japan has an extraordinarily capable scientific and industrial sector which could produce nuclear weapons; that Japan is acquiring ability to enrich uranium;12 that Japan's ships and air forces could deliver nuclear weapons; that the NPT can be denounced; and that NPT inspections are not foolproof. But it is not convincingly demonstrated that any of these latter trends could gain sufficient momentum under likely future circumstances to override the inhibitions on nuclear weapons acquisition. This writer accepts the conclusion of all but a fringe of existing studies that Japan is unlikely to acquire nuclear weapons in the near future.

However, existing studies leave crucial gaps. They overemphasize domestic public opinion and give inadequate attention to circumstances which could change that opinion. They concentrate on big power relationships and neglect smaller powers, and they usually assume either that Japanese politics will continue on a business-as-usual basis for the indefinite future, or that a government of the left would necessarily follow antimilitarist principles.

What follows will constitute a qualification to the existing literature, rather than a contradiction of it. The justification for focusing on such a qualification is that the qualification is potentially of great importance. An analyst in 1930 who wrote a scenario for a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, or a Russian analyst in 1967 who wrote a scenario for a visit by President Nixon to Peking, would have been indulging in similar exercises, namely analyzing events of rather low likelihood, contrary to virtually all the existing evidence, but nevertheless so important in their implications as to deserve intensive analysis.13

To the extent that Japanese armament is based on rational strategic calculation, Japan's antimiiitarism may be bolstered by a view that most kinds of military forces, and particularly nuclear forces, are essentially irrelevant to her greatest vulnerabilities. She needs Middle East oil, markets, raw materials, food, arid

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