EDITORIAL: Nuclear disarmament

The International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), co-chaired by former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and former Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, wrapped up its final meeting in Hiroshima on Tuesday and drafted a report that will be published in January.

A joint initiative of the Australian and Japanese governments, the ICNND was formed at the proposal of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd after his visit to Hiroshima in June 2008.

The ICNND's commissioners include former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry, who called for a nuclear-free world in an opinion piece he co-contributed to The Wall Street Journal in 2007. His co-authors were high-profile U.S. policymakers--Sam Nunn, former chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee, and former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. Nunn, Kissinger and Schultz joined the ICNND's Advisory Board.

Public and private organizations around the world have come up with numerous proposals for total nuclear disarmament, but none has led to the implementation of a decisive policy. For this reason, the ICNND set its sights a few paces ahead of where the world's leading nations stand, and sought to create an action plan that will actually nudge the world toward nuclear disarmament.

The road map adopted at the meeting in Hiroshima is as follows:

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is to be fully enforced by 2012; all nuclear states are to start preparing for disarmament talks; nuclear weapons are to serve only as a deterrence against nuclear attacks and are not to be used against non-nuclear states; work should continue to make a nuclear-free world a reachable reality by 2025; get nuclear states to agree on refraining from pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons; proceed with preparations for the creation of a treaty to ban nuclear weapons; create an international environment that will make nuclear deterrence redundant; and then eliminate all nuclear weapons.

The road map does not indicate any target year for ridding the world of nuclear weapons, nor does it say anything original about how to deal with Pyongyang's nuclear tests as well as Iran's nuclear program. Yet, this is an important road map for overhauling the current nuclear-reliant security structure and making nuclear weapons illegal. We hope the proposed initiatives will be implemented through concerted diplomatic efforts.

Cooperation between Japan and Australia will remain crucial. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and his Australian counterpart have agreed to work together on nuclear issues in keeping with the ICNND's proposals. If Hatoyama and Rudd can jointly back U.S. President Barack Obama's nuclear disarmament diplomacy and rally support around the world, that would become a powerful force for turning the proposals into actual policies.

The 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference is slated for May. We hope Japan and Australia, together with the United States, will create the opposite of a vicious circle. In other words, we hope that countries that possess nuclear weapons will actively seek nuclear disarmament, which in turn will reinforce the nuclear nonproliferation framework.

Many officials in the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry preach caution on the grounds that the proposals will weaken the power of the "nuclear umbrella."

However, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada said Sunday that the prevalent attitude today is that nuclear weapons should not be used pre-emptively, and that Japan should discuss what it can do in specific terms.

Japan is the only country that has suffered nuclear attacks. We hope Japan's message will set a global trend as soon as possible.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Oct. 21(IHT/Asahi: October 22,2009)