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George W. Bush has turned the United States into the Dean Wormer of the world in 6 very long years.
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.This was added under the influence of the Occupation after WW2, but it later became a key part of the modern Japanese national consciousness, and still is. There has been debate about it in the last few years, but it is still supported by the majority of the Japanese.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
During the Sato cabinet in the 1960's, it is reported that Japan secretly studied the development of nuclear weapons. On 17 June 1974, Japanese Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata told reporters that "it's certainly the case that Japan has the capability to possess nuclear weapons but has not made them." This remark aroused widespread concern in the international media at that time.I read an article a couple of years ago that goes as far as claiming that Japan maintains complete nuclear weapons in a disassembled state (of course I have no idea how reliable the claim is, and I can't find the source, oh well). I wonder what happened on April 9, 1984..
UN nuclear inspectors just caught close U.S. ally South Korea enriching small amounts of plutonium and uranium to weapons grade.
1984: North Korea successfully tests its first reverse-engineered Scud-B missile.Looking back, I wonder if it was a satellite, that would imply some pretty impressive capabilities. Perhaps those later statements were just diplomatic games.. Here is wikipedia's article on North Korean missile tests, which appears to include at least one incident that occurred after the end of the first link's timeframe.
1990: North Korea successfully tests a Scud-C missile, hitting targets off North Korea's eastern coast from a base in the Kangwon Province
1993: North Korea successfully tests the Nodong missile to a range of about 500km.
May 1997: North Korea tests its AG-1 cruise missile. A Pentagon official downplays the threat, saying that it uses "unimpressive, old technology" from Russian Styx and Chinese Silkworm missiles.
August 1998: North Korea tests a nuclear-capable Taepo Dong-1 missile. The missile flies over northern Japan and lands in the Pacific Ocean.
September 1998: North Korea announces that the recent test of a Taepo Dong missile was actually a launch to deploy a satellite.
September 1998: The U.S. State Department admits that North Korea did attempt to orbit a satellite as it had claimed, but failed. A three-stage Taepo Dong rocket was launched, but the satellite fell into the Pacific still attached to the third stage.
The CIA frets that China could have a hundred nuclear missiles targeted on the United States by 2015, but that is actually evidence of China's great restraint. The first Chinese nuclear weapons test was forty years ago, and by now China could have thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on the US if it wanted. (The United States DOES have thousands of nuclear warheads that can strike Chinese targets.)
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The Beijing regime is obsessed with economic stability, because it fears that a severe downturn would trigger social and political upheaval. The last thing it wants is a military confrontation with its biggest trading partner, the United States. It will go on playing the nationalist card over Taiwan to curry domestic political favour, but there is no
massive military build-up and no plausible threat of impending war in East Asia.
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posted by RTQP at 2:20 PM on July 4, 2006