US-Japan relations Good- North Korea

US-Japan relations Good- North Korea

Relations key to solving North Korea War

Okamoto 02

[Yukio Okamoto, president of Okamoto Associates, Inc., special adviser to the cabinet and chairman of the Japanese prime minister’s Task Force on Foreign Relations. The Washington Quarterly, Spring 2002, http://www.twq.com/02spring/okamoto.pdf]

Despite its years of famine; its evaporating industrial and energy infrastructure; and its choking, inhumane society, the DPRK government still refuses to retreat to its place on the ash heap of history. Despite the poverty of the people, the North Korean military maintains an arsenal of thousands of rocket launchers and pieces of artillery-- some of which are possibly loaded with chemical and biological warheads -- awaiting the signal to wipe Seoul off the map. The DPRK's immense stock of weapons includes large numbers of Nodong missiles capable of striking Japan's western coastal regions and probably longer-range missiles capable of hitting every major Japanese city. The United States has two combat aircraft wings in the ROK, in Osan and Kunsan. In addition, some 30,000 U.S. Army troops are stationed near Seoul. Most military experts admit that the army troops serve a largely symbolic function; if an actual war were to erupt, a massive North Korean artillery bombardment could pin down both the U.S. Eighth Army and the ROK armed forces at the incipient stage. The firepower the USFJ can bring to bear upon the Korean Peninsula within a matter of hours makes the U.S.-Japan alliance the Damoclean sword hanging over the DPRK. The DPRK leaders are masters of deception and manipulation, but they know that launching a military strike against the ROK will expose them to a strong and final counterstrike from U.S. forces in Japan.

This risks nuclear wars throughout Asia

Cimbala, 10 - Prof. of Political Science @ Penn State, (Stephen, Nuclear Weapons and Cooperative Security in the 21st Century, p. 117-8)
Failure to contain proliferation in Pyongyang could spread nuclear fever throughout Asia. Japan and South Korea might seek nuclear weapons and missile defenses. A pentagonal configuration of nuclear powers in the Pacific basis (Russia, China, Japan, and the two Koreas – not including the United States, with its own Pacific interests) could put deterrence at risk and create enormous temptation toward nuclear preemption. Apart from actual use or threat of use, North Korea could exploit the mere existence of an assumed nuclear capability in order to support its coercive diplomacy. As George H. Quester has noted:

If the Pyongyang regime plays its cards sensibly and well, therefore, the world will not see its nuclear weapons being used against Japan or South Korea or anyone else, but will rather see this new nuclear arsenal held in reserve (just as the putative Israeli nuclear arsenal has been held in reserve), as a deterrent against the outside world’s applying maximal pressure on Pyongyang and as a bargaining chip to extract the economic and political concessions that the DPRK needs if it wishes to avoid giving up its peculiar approach to social engineering.

A five-sided nuclear competition in the Pacific would be linked, in geopolitical deterrence and proliferation space, to the existing nuclear deterrents in India and Pakistan, and to the emerging nuclear weapons status of Iran. An arc of nuclear instability from Tehran to Tokyo could place U.S. proliferation strategies into the ash heap of history and call for more drastic military options, not excluding preemptive war, defenses, and counter-deterrent special operations. In addition, an eight-sided nuclear arms race in Asia would increase the likelihood of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war. It would do so because: (1) some of these states already have histories of protracted conflict; (2) states may have politically unreliable or immature command and control systems, especially during a crisis involving a decision for nuclear first strike or retaliation; unreliable or immature systems might permit a technical malfunction that caused an unintended launch, or a deliberate but unauthorized launch by rogue commanders; (3) faulty intelligence and warning systems might cause one side to misinterpret the other’s defensive moves to forestall attack as offensive preparations for attack, thus triggering a mistaken preemption.

US-Japan relations Good- Prolif

Key to Solve East Asia Prolif

Nye and Armitage 7

[Joseph Nye University Distinguished Service Professor and Richard Armitage Deputy Secretary of State, “The U.S. Japan Alliance”, Feburary 2007, http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/070216_asia2020.pdf ]

To address the growing threat of missile proliferation in the region, the United States and Japan have cooperated to develop missile defense technologies and concepts. The United States and Japan are now in the process of producing and employing a missile defense system, sharing the technological capabilities of the world’s two largest economies. By cooperating on this important venture, Japan will benefit from the synergies resulting from a missile defense command and control system, improving its joint operational systems and our bilateral ability to quickly share critical information. To produce and employ missile defense systems successfully together, Japan changed its prohibition on military exports, allowing such exports to the United States. Through all of these measures, the alliance made rapid progress in defense cooperation to meet challenges imposed by the existing security environment.

East Asia prolif causes nuclear war.

Cerincione ’00 (Joseph, Director of the Non-Proliferation Project – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Foreign Policy, “The Asian nuclear reaction chain”, Issue 118, Spring, Proquest)
The blocks would fall quickest and hardest in Asia, where proliferation pressures are already building more quickly than anywhere else in the world. If a nuclear breakout takes place in Asia, then the international arms control agreements that have been painstakingly negotiated over the past 40 years will crumble. Moreover, the United States could find itself embroiled in its fourth war on the Asian continent in six decades--a costly rebuke to those who seek the safety of Fortress America by hiding behind national missile defenses. Consider what is already happening: North Korea continues to play guessing games with its nuclear and missile programs; South Korea wants its own missiles to match Pyongyang's; India and Pakistan shoot across borders while running a slow-motion nuclear arms race; China modernizes its nuclear arsenal amid tensions with Taiwan and the United States; Japan's vice defense minister is forced to resign after extolling the benefits of nuclear weapons; and Russia-whose Far East nuclear deployments alone make it the largest Asian nuclear power-struggles to maintain territorial coherence. Five of these states have nuclear weapons; the others are capable of constructing them. Like neutrons firing from a split atom, one nation's actions can trigger reactions throughout the region, which in turn, stimulate additional actions. These nations form an interlocking Asian nuclear reaction chain that vibrates dangerously with each new development. If the frequency and intensity of this reaction cycle increase, critical decisions taken by any one of these governments could cascade into the second great wave of nuclear-weapon proliferation, bringing regional and global economic and political instability and, perhaps, the first combat use of a nuclear weapon since 1945.

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