THE RISING EAST

By Richard Halloran

If the Japanese are to build a defense against ballistic missiles, as increasingly seems likely, their main difficulty in making it work will be cultural, not technical or political, and will require a revolution in the way they make decisions.

North Korea fired a Taepo Dong missile over Japan five years ago and has been acting more belligerent ever since. Japan would have only about two minutes to react if North Korea staged a real attack. Advertiser library photo

Expressed more realistically, that's only 120 seconds, in an operation where seconds count. For a nation that makes personal and national decisions only after painful deliberation, that will require a wrenching organizational change.

Further, the authority to execute a ballistic missile defense (BMD) must be pushed well down the chain of command, to the captain of a ship armed with anti-missile weapons or the commander of a land-based firing battery. There won't be time to consult with senior military leaders, to say nothing of the minister of defense, national legislature (Diet), or prime minister.

Japan is on the verge of setting up a missile defense because, five years ago, North Korea fired a Taepo Dong missile over Japan and has been ever more belligerent since. That threat has begun to bring most Japanese out of the pacifist cocoon in which the country wrapped itself in 1945 after its devastating defeat in World War II.

As David Fouse, a researcher at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, wrote recently: "With television and the printed media keeping the North Korea issue before the public's eyes on a daily basis, left-leaning pacifists have been virtually silenced on the BMD issue."

A ballistic missile defense comprises several phases: detection, in which satellites sense the launch of an enemy missile; communication to high-speed computers that determine the missile's trajectory and target; the decision to shoot at the attacking missiles; and the launch of defensive missiles.

Since a missile fired from North Korea would take seven minutes or less to reach targets in Japan, the Japanese would have to make a 120-second decision to defend themselves. Presumably they would want to destroy the incoming missiles as far away as possible, and to hit them as they are rising, before they reach the peak of their trajectories and then pick up speed on the downward slope.

The decision to shoot back would not be made in a vacuum. The United States, for instance, has what are known as defense conditions, or DEFCONs, in which political, military and diplomatic intelligence is combined to provide a strategic warning to the armed forces. DEFCON 5 is the peacetime state of alert; DEFCON 1 means war is imminent.

The United States and Japan already share such intelligence, including on North Korea's missile deployments. "There isn't much that we know that they don't know, and vice versa," said a U.S. official.

Thus Japanese leaders and military commanders would have been alerted that a North Korean missile launch was progressively more likely.

At the same time, Japan's Self-Defense Forces are not accustomed to making split-second decisions, or having them come from political leaders.

After an earthquake struck the city of Kobe in 1995, killing 6,200 people and destroying 136,000 houses and apartment buildings, it took nearly 24 hours for self-defense troops to start assisting in rescue operations, because Japan's political leaders dithered.

Complicating a decision to let loose defensive missiles would be the United States, which has air, naval and land forces on bases from Misawa in northern Japan to the southern island Okinawa.

If the North Koreans show unmistakable signs of preparing to attack those bases, the United States will go to DEFCON 1 and strike first. "We will pre-empt," said a U.S. official.

The Japanese have many other obstacles to forging a missile defense.

They must decide whether it would constitute collective defense, since it would be integrated with that of the United States — some Japanese argue that would violate the "no-war" constitution.

They must decide whether to manufacture the weapons, computers and communications equipment themselves, or buy them from the United States, which would be cheaper but take business away from Japanese industry.

The most demanding issue, however, will be deciding who will command the missile defenses and order them into action, because there won't be time to reach a consensus. It will be a "use 'em or lose 'em" military decision that must be made in 120 seconds — something no Japanese has done for more than a half-century.