Fallout from Pentagon's gaffe spreads

[FarCenter]

By Kosuke Takahashi - http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/JL13Dh01.html

TOKYO - As the latest round of six-party talks on North Korea's scrapping of its nuclear arms program ended on Thursday without any discernable progress, growing controversy over a United States defense report "mistakenly" listing the Hermit Kingdom as one of Asia's five nuclear powers has experts from the region fretting that the error was a Freudian slip.

Adding fuel to the fire is US Defense Secretary Robert Gates' remark in the January/February 2009 edition of Foreign Affairs magazine that "North Korea has built several nuclear bombs".

Caught between a diplomatic rock and a military hard place, has some new thinking on North Korea's atomic ambitions emerged in Washington? Or are the report's findings a reality, which has resulted from the dangerous precedent the US set when tacitly accepting proliferation to states like India and Pakistan, which are not signatories to the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT)?

The controversy over the Pentagon report and Gates' remarks has risen at a time when there are no clear US answers - or actions - to respond to these questions, and this bothers a lot of people in East Asia.

Many analysts in Tokyo balk at the notion of the US formally admitting that the North is a nuclear power. This is a reality which would lead to future six-party talks being reclassified as "disarmament" negotiations, a significant strengthening of the North's hand and a deepening of security fears for the North's regional rivals.


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