Posted on: Sunday, May 29, 2005

THE RISING EAST

By Richard Halloran

Every now and then there appear articles or reports so wide of the mark that they cry out for rebuttal.

Two separate dispatches, one from the political right, the other from the left, have uttered equal nonsense.

From the right, a report from the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee urged the United States to play a Japanese nuclear card in demanding that China force North Korea to give up its plans to acquire nuclear weapons.

From the left, an anti-American essay by a China specialist at Chatham House, a research center in London, asserted that the Bush administration and its neo-conservative allies were planning a war against China that America could not win.

The Republican committee, chaired by Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, asserted: "Essentially, the United States must demand that the PRC (People's Republic of China) make a choice: either help out or face the possibility of other nuclear neighbors." The report did not name Japan but left little doubt that it wanted America to encourage Japan to go nuclear if China did not rein in North Korea.

This suggestion, which has come earlier from other Republicans, is claptrap for three reasons. First and perhaps most important, there is no Japanese nuclear card to play.

Japan clearly has the technology to produce nuclear arms. Some 50 nuclear power plants produce a third of the nation's electricity. A Japanese strategic thinker many years ago said Japan was "N minus six months," meaning it could detonate a nuclear device within six months of a decision to do so. Today, say informed Japanese, that is down to three months.

The primary restraint in Japan is the "nuclear allergy" that is the legacy of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago. It is still so strong that political leaders in Tokyo who decided to produce a nuclear weapon would be confronted with colossal rioting and blood flowing in the streets, possibly including their own.

Second, Japanese acquisition of nuclear arms would have unpredictable consequences throughout East Asia. Japan is slowly shedding the pacifist cocoon in which it wrapped itself after World War II, including deploying a small ground unit to Iraq.

That has been accepted by Tokyo's neighbors, but the leap to nuclear arms would surely cause political and popular eruptions from Seoul to Singapore that would do the U.S. posture in Asia no good.

Third, the Senate Republican recommendation, if accepted, would destroy the counter-proliferation policy of President Bush. The administration has sought to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear arms not only for that threat itself, but equally important, because that would breach the line discouraging other nations from seeking nuclear arms.

It is true that a debate about nuclear arms has broken out in Japan, in sharp contrast to the self-imposed ban on such discussions five years ago. That, however, is talk and nowhere to be seen is a political, technical or financial movement to acquire and pay for the weapons.

The question of war between the United States and China was broached in an essay by David Wall, a scholar at Chatham House. He asserted that the Bush administration was preparing for an inevitable war with China. Further, he contended: "The U.S. knows that it could not win a military war with China. The nuclear capability of both sides is redundant; neither side could use it."

Wall was wrong on both counts.

The Bush administration has sought to engage China on one hand and to deter it on the other. In his authoritative book on the president's security team, "Rise of the Vulcans," James Mann said: "The administration set carefully limited goals that could be achieved without either a collapse or a capitulation by the Chinese regime."

Officers at the Pacific Command in Hawai'i, who draft contingency plans to be executed if hostilities erupt, have emphasized that those plans are intended to deter China. They have also said, publicly and privately, that China should not misread U.S. intentions and capabilities.

Several years ago, Adm. Dennis Blair, then head of the Pacific Command, told a congressional committee that he made two points in discussions with China's leaders. One was that the United States had no intention of attacking China, and American military preparations were intended only to persuade the Chinese not to miscalculate.

The second, Blair said, pointing to American sea and air power, and implicitly, the U.S. nuclear arsenal, was more blunt: "Don't mess with us."

Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia.