Two prime ministers in the 1960s called for Japan to have nuclear arms, despite the activism of the world's only atomic-bombed nation to abolish the weapons, a newspaper said yesterday.
The Asahi Shimbun, citing unclassified US government documents, said then prime minister Eisaku Sato expressed support for nuclear weapons after neighboring China conducted its first nuclear test in October 1964.
Speaking in December that year with US ambassador Edwin Reischauer, Sato said that he agreed with British prime minister Harold Wilson that it was common sense to have nuclear weapons if other nations did, the report said.
The newspaper said it was the second time a Japanese premier was documented in the unclassified papers as supporting nuclear weapons.
In 1961, then prime minister Hayato Ikeda told the US secretary of state Dean Rusk that some in his Cabinet supported nuclear weapons, the Asahi said.
Japan is set this week to begin marking the 60th anniversary of the world's only nuclear bombings, which killed more than 210,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
After Rusk gathered that Japan was considering going nuclear, US president Lyndon Johnson assured Sato at a January 1965 summit that Japan would be secure under the US nuclear umbrella, the report said.
But the assurance was hidden from the public as Sato was worried about opposition, it said.
Nearly three years later in December 1967, Sato expressed Japan's so-called non-nuclear principles -- that is, it will not produce, possess or allow the entry of nuclear weapons into the nation.
The principles remain in force and are widely supported, although some analysts believe the debate on whether to go nuclear could be revived if North Korea develops a nuclear arsenal.
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