President Barack Obama on Friday said the United States and Japan are committed to "strong actions" in response to North Korea's "provocations" as he welcomed Japan's premier to the White House.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held his first meeting with Obama two months after his right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party swept back into power, on a visit aimed at sending a strong signal to China over a territorial row. North Korean nuclear tests – what next? Sergey Duz: Russia is calling on all countries not
to use the fact that North Korea, despite a ban, has tested nuclear weapons, as a pretext for a military attack on North Korea. Russia also insists that attempts to persuade North Korea not to create, test or use nuclear weapons should not be stopped. At the same time, Russia does not believe that the fact that North Korea now has nuclear weapons presents a serious threat for security in the world. This position of Russia was recently expressed by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He said that although Russia condemns the North Korean nuclear tests, it would be wrong for countries neighboring North Korea to now start arming themselves against possible nuclear attacks from North Korea. Many analysts share Mr. Lavrov’s conviction that even if North Korea or, say, Iran start to produce nuclear weapons of their own, it would be wrong to be afraid that other countries, in response, will arm themselves with nuclear weapons very soon. Experts in military technologies, like, for example, Professor Peter Jones from the Stanford University, say that creating and making nuclear weapons very quickly is physically impossible. If we look back into history, we’ll see that within the last 50 years, only 4 countries in the world started to produce nuclear weapons of their own. Take the examples of Japan and South Korea, Professor Peter Jones says. At present, these two countries have everything to start producing nuclear weapons. Still, they don’t produce them – even in spite of the fact that they are close neighbors of the allegedly dangerous North Korea. Professor Jones is convinced that rumors about the “nuclear threat” are, to a big extent, being spread by high-ranking military officials who want their governments to allocate more money on defence. However, the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine “Rossiya v Globalnoy Politike” (“Russia in global policy”) Fyodor Lukyanov, in his turn, believes that Professor Jones in underestimating the nuclear threat. “The professor is right in saying that producing nuclear weapons is not a very easy task,” Mr. Lukyanov says. “But, still, it is not as difficult as he depicts it. After all, technologies that allow the production of nuclear weapons did not appear only yesterday. They were invented already in the first half of the 20th century.” “And, speaking about Japan and South Korea, it is wrong to say that they don’t arm themselves with nuclear weapons because they are not afraid of North Korea,” another Russian analyst, Evegeny Buzhinsky, adds. “The real reason is that Japan and South Korea are bound by certain agreements with the US. If they start producing nuclear weapons of their own, this may spoil their relations with the US.” Pyotr Topychkanov from the Moscow Institute of World Economy and International Relations says: “Fortunately, the threat of a nuclear war is low today. The time when the world was divided into two large camps, the “capitalist” and the Communist, has long passed. However, this doesn’t totally rule out the threat of a nuclear attack.” Well, it would be probably wrong to panic – but, on the other hand, it cannot be denied that the appearance of nuclear weapons in North Korea is hampering the process of a worldwide nuclear disarmament. In such a situation, politicians should be more careful not to make ill-considered steps. Source: Voice of Russia
