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4/16/2010 - Former Minister Calls for Democracies to Consider Missile Defense

A former Japanese minister of defense and national security advisor has called on Asia’s democracies to consider regional missile defense in response to the growing threat of nuclear and missile cooperation between Iran and North Korea.

In an article for Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, yesterday, Yuriko Koike describes how a substantial number of North Koreans live and work in Iran; not as unskilled, low paid laborers like those in places like Dubai, Russia’s Far East or Eastern Europe but, he asserts, as highly skilled workers on the transfer, in contravention of UN Resolutions, of military technology to the radical Islamic regime in Tehran.

According to Koike, this “nuclear honeymoon” between North Korea and Iran represents “today’s most perilous threat,” a threat which international negotiations on the NPT (Non-Proliferation Regime) can have little effect on.

Koike asserts that North Korea hopes that by “aiding nuclear proliferation and transferring essential nuclear and related technologies to the Middle East's most radical regime,” it will be possible to “shape radical Islamic fundamentalism as a pro-North Korean bastion.”

She also claims that international sanctions, by their very effectiveness in some cases, have made relationships with countries such as Iran all the more critical for the Pyongyang regime.

To this end, she cites internal North Korean government documents obtained by Japanese intelligence which suggest that a new shell company, Lyongaksan General Trading Corporation, was created this year for the express purpose of playing the “central role in managing the export of missile and nuclear technologies to Iran.”

Therefore, given the scale of the Iran-North Korea relationship and added to the apparently small likelihood of China starting to interdict shipments between North Korea and Iran which must pass over, through or near Chinese territory as per UN Resolutions 1718 and 1874, Koike concludes that bold measures are necessary.

This, she believes, ought to include Asia's democracies starting to “think seriously about cooperating on regional missile defense.”

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