Thursday, June 18, 2009

Japan As An Incipient Nuclear Weapons State

Yesterday's vote total in the House of Councillors on the resolution calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

What the resolution said:

"As the only country to have suffered a nuclear bombing, and in aiming for the elimination of the world's nuclear weapons, our country has spearheaded the submission of resolutions calling for 'Nuclear disarmament for ultimate abolition of the nuclear weapons' to the United Nations General Assembly since 1994. We feel we have an obligation to continue presssing forward with this action.

However, in this post-Cold War present, the threat posed by the dissemination and proliferation of not just nuclear weapons but missiles capable of bearing nuclear warheads, nucleonic materials and nuclear technologies has grown steadily higher. In order to break out of this situation, the President Obama of the United States declared the decision to pursue a 'World without nuclear weapons' on April 5 last. Moreover, United Nations Security Council has shown a posture of obdurate rejection of the nuclear tests of the Democratic Republic of North Korea in UN Security Council Resolution 1874, et al.

We must take advantage of this situation and should work together with the nuclear weapons states and the non-nuclear weapons states to ensure an effective inspections regime to grapple with the reduction and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the government should seize this opportunity to fulfill a leadership role at Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference in 2010 and appeal to the international community, starting with the nuclear weapons states, to quickly bring into force the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as well as implementation of the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, and by other acts work to further strengthen its efforts toward the non-proliferation, reduction and total elimination of nuclear weapons.

It is so resolved."

Tamogami Toshio, Nishimura Shingo, still wrong.

Llewelyn Hughes, still correct.

Image credit: Jiji Tsūshin
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Translation by MTC from the resolution text available on the Kahoku Shimbun website.

1 comment:

Martin J Frid said...

Thanks for finding this and translating it. Similar resolutions should be made in more countries. I visited Hiroshima earlier this year and noted that the mayors' global campaign against nuclear weapons is very sucessful. After all, it is city administrations that will have to try to deal with the mess after an attack. And in the case of no attacks, nuclear weapons tend to direct funding away from services that the public needs...

Where did you find the photo?