A-bomb survivors furious at test

Few people are angrier that North Korea has joined the world's nuclear club than Sunao Tsuboi. As a 20-year-old student in Hiroshima, he was burned from head to toe when the US dropped the Fat Man A-bomb in August 1945. He still bears the scars on his face and body.

"We're furious about this test," he says of Japan's 270,000 A-bomb survivors. "Our greatest worry is that Japan will now feel it has to have its own nuclear weapon."

Japan's legacy as the world's only A-bomb victim means any talk of developing its nuclear option has long been taboo. But the limits of this taboo are again being tested.

Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is the latest politician to suggest that Japan should "study the nuclear issue".

This week, Japan's largest newspaper the Yomiuri also said the country should reconsider its aversion to the bomb, urging the Government to not let its "emotional nuclear allergy" stop it from "taking a realistic response to such a major change".

Politics, not technology, hinders the development of Japanese nuclear weapons. The world's second-largest economy also boasts one of its largest nuclear industries, with 55 reactors operating, 11 more planned, and a huge new reprocessing plant.

In 2002, senior opposition figure Ichiro Ozawa spelled out the implications of goading this sleeping giant when he told China that it would be "a simple matter" for Japan to build "3000 to 4000 nuclear warheads" if its neighbour got "too inflated". Most experts believe a bomb could be built in six months.

In public, new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe resists such calls, but Japan's strict anti-nuclear stance has not always matched the politicians' rhetoric. Nuclear-armed US vessels have secretly docked in Japanese ports, and most experts believe Pyongyang's bomb is likely to push Tokyo closer into the arms of the US.

Abe has already pledged to speed up the development of an as-yet-unproven joint missile defence shield and to boost defence ties, a strategy that inevitably brings him into conflict with Japan's "pacifist" constitution. But few of the A-Bomb survivors are prepared to bet that the nuclear freeze will hold forever. Kuboi has watched in despair as the world's nuclear club has grown from one to eight. "Our hopes have gone up and down since 1945, but I can't remember a time as bad as this."

- INDEPENDENT