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Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada said today it was possible that U.S. nuclear weapons could be brought into his country's territory in the event of a security crisis, Kyodo News reported (see GSN, March 11).
"In a case in which Japan's security cannot be protected unless we accept temporary port calls by U.S. ships carrying nuclear weapons, the government at that time would make a decision even if it may affect its political fortunes," Okada told lawmakers.
He reaffirmed, though, Tokyo's long-established principles banning the production, presence and possession of nuclear weapons in Japan.
Okada's statement follows the government's formal acknowledgment last week of a decades-old agreement that allowed nuclear-armed U.S. sea vessels to stop in Japan. That deal appeared to have become moot following Washington's decision in 1991 to remove all tactical nuclear weapons from its warships and submarines (Kyodo News/Breitbart.com, March 17).
Meanwhile, a former U.S. official said Monday that the United States violated a security treaty by storing nuclear nuclear weapons in Japan in 1966, Jiji Press reported (see GSN, Feb. 26).
The incident occurred in 1966, one year before Tokyo established its antinuclear principles, according to George Packard, a one-time aide to former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin Reischauer.
Reischauer "learned almost by accident" that the Marine Corps had nuclear weapons at an installation in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Packard said in a speech in Washington. The diplomat threatened to quit and make public "this flagrant violation" of the U.S.-Japanese security pact if the weapons remained in Japan more than 90 days, Packard said.
He said the United States pulled the weapons and did not again bring them to Japan.
Packard also asserted in an essay published last month in Foreign Affairs magazine that U.S. nuclear weapons had in 1966 been moved from Okinawa -- then in U.S. hands -- to the main island of Japan (Jiji Press, March 16).