The Japan Times

Steven Clemons on Japan's Nuclear Options in The Japan Times

Communications — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:05:00 -0400

New America in the News:

OSAKA -- Despite Tokyo's pledge to remain nonnuclear and assurances from top U.S. officials that their most important Pacific ally will do just that, North Korea's apparent atomic test is expected to further weaken taboos about talk of a nuclear-armed Japan in both Washington and Tokyo.

Influential academics and researchers, as well as politicians on both sides of the Pacific, have long called for Japan to seriously consider developing a nuclear deterrent...

"Key American Japan-handlers are helping to coax politicians like (former Prime Minister Yasuhiro) Nakasone, (Democratic Party of Japan President Ichiro) Ozawa and others to publicly discuss Japanese nuclear options," said Steven Clemons, director of foreign policy programs at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.

"These people, especially those who have left the Bush administration but are still influential, are helping to enable the thinking, and sparking synapses in Tokyo about this politically volatile topic.

"Obviously, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can't publicly repudiate the nonnuclear principles, but he can, perhaps, privately work to establish a new consensus," Clemons said of Japan's stated principles of not possessing, not producing and not allowing the entry into the country of atomic weapons...

Declassified records show that the U.S. military stored atomic weapons in Okinawa and the Ogasawara Islands, and brought them into Japanese ports in the 1950s and 1960s.

"Tokyo could request short-term deployment of U.S. nukes on Japanese soil" Clemons said. A longer-term possibility, he added, would be for Japan to develop but not declare a nuclear weapons capability, remaining vague about what arms it actually possessed -- something Israel has done to deter an attack by its Arab neighbors...

For the complete article, please visit The Japan Times website.

Betting on a Bolder Japan

Articles — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 02:00:00 -0400

A Latin proverb says, "fortune favors the bold but abandons the timid." That, more than any other explanation captures the drama of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's gravity-defying success in catapulting his Liberal Democratic Party to its biggest electoral success ever--in contrast to the rival Democratic Party of Japan imploding from its internal contradictions and political inarticulateness.

Many political observers are casting Koizumi's extraordinary election wizardry in terms of a referendum on postal reform--and reform in general. This is an incorrect assessment.

What the Japanese people have voted for was boldness, vision, and a type of decisiveness that Japan has… more

Enronization of the Bush Administration

Articles — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

President George W. Bush has become the new Kenneth Lay. As chief executive officer of the former juggernaut Enron Corp., Lay presided over a network of deception and malfeasance that led to one of the greatest investor ripoffs in U.S. corporate history. Enron inflated reported income and conducted much of its business through off-balance-sheet transactions hidden from analysts, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the general public.

In public, Bush repeatedly denounces these "serious abuses of trust by some corporate leaders." But given the disturbing sleight of hand manipulations by his administration regarding the search for weapons of mass destruction, or… more

U.S. Policy Crucial to Stability

Articles — Sat, 03 Nov 2001 00:00:00 -0500

U.S. President George W. Bush has injected potentially destabilizing dynamics into the domestic political arenas of many nations by pressuring all countries essentially to swear loyalty oaths to the United States and to work with him in going "after terrorism wherever we find it in the world . . . getting it by its branch and root."

Russia, China, Tunisia and even North Korea, in addition to nearly every other nation in the world, have signed on to the president's campaign and are remaking their own moral profiles and the world's geopolitical landscape in the process. Some in the White… more