This past weekend I wrote a post concerning the 60th anniversary of the atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One of the comments I received was from Nightfly. Part of his comment stated agreement with my post while the end of his comment raised an interesting point:

Oh, and one downside to the terrible hammer blow to Japanese martial spirit – now they’re scarcely involved in defending themselves against the similar toxic brew of national pride and expansionist power exhibited by the ChiComs. I worry about Taiwan, but I’m also worried about Tokyo.

My response to his point was:

…they [Japan], like Germany have relied on the U.S. for too long for their protection. They ought to be waking up to the cold fact that North Korea either has nuclear weapons or will have them in the near future. Also, North Korea is just desperate enough to launch them at the South and at Japan.

The implications of this are huge. Toss in the mix a rising China and Japan is in a tight spot. I guess one of the risks if Japan started re-arming would be that China would feel threatened and may attack or that North Korea would see its position weakened even further and toss nukes at everyone.

If Japan had been re-arming for the past 20 years, the situation may have been totally different. I guess we will never know what the effect would have been on China and North Korea if Japan had re-armed.

Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are in many ways on the chopping block. I pray there is another way. But I am not optimistic.

Today the Washington Times has a story about Japan possibly re-thinking its policy on nuclear weapons. Their story falls into line with what Nightfly and I were concerned about.

Japan currently bans nuclear weapons from its country and territories. Even U.S. warships armed with nuclear weapons are not allowed threw Japans territorial waters. But with the possibility of a nuclear North Korea, some leaders are beginning to re-think that policy.

Japan will likely choose to remain as “America’s strategic dependent,” wrote Robyn Lim, professor of international relations at Nanzan University in Nagoya, in the July 19 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief.

But, he said, “Because of the growing sense of threat from North Korea’s dangerous nuclear ambitions, it is no longer taboo to talk about nuclear weapons in Japan.”

For 34 years, Japan’s nuclear-weapons policy has been based on three principles known as the “sangensoku,” under which the country renounces the right to own or produce nuclear weapons or allow them on Japanese territory.

But Tokyo foreign-affairs columnist Yoichi Funabashi says a debate has begun within Japan’s defense-policy community on whether to amend the sangensoku to afford free passage to nuclear-armed U.S. warships.

Shinzo Abe, a rising political star and grandson of former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, has gone further, arguing that there is nothing unconstitutional about possessing small, strategic nuclear weapons. Mr. Abe is considered a leading contender to replace Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose term ends in 2006.

Similarly hawkish pronouncements have been heard from influential opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa, who told an audience in Fukuoka in 2002: “It would be so easy for us to produce nuclear warheads. We have plutonium at nuclear-power plants in Japan, enough to make several thousand such warheads.” [emphasis mine]

It will be interesting to see how the region as a whole responds to the duel threat of a nuclear armed North Korea and a rising China. Will South Korea and Japan wake up and see that they need to begin preparing for a new arms race to counter these threats, or will they continue to suckle at Americas tit?

I think that the U.S. needs to make it clear that we can not defend everybody forever. At some point you need to be responsible for your own security. I also think that we ought to offer our burgeoning missile defense shield to Japan and South Korea. Also, funding for the deployment, testing and research for a better missile defense should be increased rapidly. The threat of a nuclear attack by China or North Korea is a very real possibility. We have a working prototype, we need to properly fund and deploy it before it is too late.