Worried that a nuclear arms race in Asia could eventually mean communist North Korea getting atomic weapons, Japan yesterday proposed that nuclear non-proliferation be discussed at an emergency session of the world's nine major powers in London.
Tokyo hopes that the meeting of the nine countries - the G8 comprising Britain, France, the United States, Canada, Germany, Russia, Italy and Japan, plus China - will be held at ministerial level in London on June 10th, officials in Tokyo said.
The crisis arising over the detonations of nuclear devices in Pakistan and India in the last two weeks is expected to dominate talks next week in Beijing between the US National Security Adviser, Mr Sandy Berger, and Chinese officials.
Mr Berger arrives on Monday to prepare for the visit to China by President Clinton later in June.
It was revealed yesterday that China's President Jiang Zemin, at the personal urging of President Clinton, wrote a letter to the Pakistan government earlier this week asking it not to carry out nuclear tests in response to India's five detonations two weeks ago.
Mr Clinton used a new telephone hotline between the two countries for the first time to call President Jiang on Monday.
China has long supported Pakistan's nuclear ambitions and US reports say Beijing passed nuclear weapons technology, ring magnets and a blueprint of the bomb to Islamabad before scaling back its aid in the last two years. The letter from President Jiang is seen by US officials as a positive step towards a joint US-China approach to nuclear proliferation in Asia. Washington delivered strongly worded protests to both India and Pakistan yesterday, urging them to avoid a further escalation of tension. The Indian Prime Minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, yesterday told the Indian parliament that Pakistan's nuclear tests posed no new threat to India's security and added that New Delhi had no intention of joining an arms race. "Let me emphasise again our no-first-use [of nuclear weapons] proposal," he stated. "While emergency is its internal affair let me assure Pakistan faces no threat from India," he said, referring to Pakistan's decision to declare a state of emergency. "We seek good relations with all neighbours, including China [with whom] we are linked through history and geography."
Japan's grave concerns about nuclear proliferation stem from the fact that five years ago North Korea fired a medium-range Rodong-1 missile into the Sea of Japan, demonstrating that parts of western Japan are within range of nuclear attack by the communist regime in Pyongyang, which is still officially at war with South Korea.
Still haunted by the horror of the atomic bombs which laid waste to the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, Japan is worried that Pakistan could in the future pass nuclear technology to North Korea.
"The nuclear issue in south-west Asia could spread to north-east Asia, notably North Korea. That's our major concern," a Japanese government official was reported as saying in Tokyo. North Korea has denied developing nuclear weapons, but recently it accused the United States of not living up to the terms of a deal to supply it with nuclear power using non-weapons grade plutonium. The US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, told South Korea and Japan this month that North Korea might restart a nuclear weapons programme if it was not provided with fuel oil and nuclear power technology as agreed by a US-led consortium.
US intelligence officials warned last night that Pakistan could conduct more nuclear testing as early as this weekend and also test its medium-range Ghauri missile within a week. Pakistan has begun preparing for another test in the Ras Koh mountain range in Baluchistan, near the Afghan border.