Japan’s Communists Reopen Issue of A-Weapons, Port Calls

Japan’s Communist Party has reopened the issue of U.S. ships carrying nuclear weapons into Japanese ports, citing a document it says is a 1966 telegram from then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.

The document appears to confirm that U.S. ships and aircraft routinely brought nuclear weapons into Japan for short transit periods. It also alludes to “confidential arrangements” regarding introduction of nuclear weapons under a 1960 security treaty.

In view of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear issue is the most sensitive in Japan’s military relationship with the United States.

For years, Japanese opposition parties and anti-war activists have been trying to prove decisively that the Japanese government, on a regular basis, breaks its own policy of strictly barring the “introduction” of nuclear weapons into the country.

The Japan Communist Party says the cable, stamped secret, was declassified and found in January in the U.S. Library of Congress.

In Washington, a State Department spokesman said U.S. officials “are now in the process of checking the authenticity of the document and will not comment on its content until we have done so.”

The Japanese Foreign Ministry on Monday night declined comment on the document’s contents pending study. But, as in the past, the ministry denied there was any secret agreement or any acquiescence to bringing weapons in.

The Communists and other opposition groups are preparing to take the issue to Parliament. “The existence of the secret agreement is indisputable,” Shoji Niihara, a member of the party’s secretariat, told reporters Monday.

The Japan Communist Party says the document in question was sent to the Tokyo embassy in February, 1966. It lays out points to be used to turn the Japanese against a proposal on nuclear weapons from then-Soviet leader Alexei N. Kosygin. He had suggested that in an arms control agreement, the superpowers would renounce nuclear attacks against countries that did not have nuclear weapons within their borders.

“If proposal adopted,” the document said, “it is possible that the ambiguity GOJ (Government of Japan) has accepted on presence of nuclear weapons on U.S. vessels in Japanese ports and on transiting U.S. aircraft might no longer be accepted. This would drastically reduce utility of U.S. bases in Japan. . . . GOJ should also be reminded that confidential 1960 agreement affords U.S. right to seek GOJ consent to introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan.”