Pacific Rim Needs Isle of the Darned

Here’s a modest proposal for Asia:

Let’s build a huge artificial island somewhere out in the Western Pacific on which can be dumped the many projects Asian governments don’t want on their own soil (though they are eager to have somewhere else).

Nimby Island, we can call it. NIMBY is the acronym for the old phrase Americans use in local politics: “not in my backyard.”

At the moment, it looks as if Taiwan could use Nimby Island. For the last several years, Taiwan has been searching ever more desperately for someplace in Asia to stash its nuclear waste.

This island of 21 million people runs three nuclear power plants and is planning a fourth. These nukes are OK for electricity, but they leave Taiwan with a colossal problem of waste disposal.

Taiwan’s hunt has produced more than its share of drama, some of it quite entertaining.

My favorite was the North Korea gambit. Last year, Taiwan signed a pact with the Pyongyang government to store its nuclear wastes in an abandoned North Korean coal mine. Taiwan was to have paid North Korea at least $75 million, and perhaps more than $200 million, depending on how many barrels of nuclear waste it could send.

Taiwan canceled the deal after the South Koreans objected. That’s right, the South Koreans. Having flaky Kim Jong Il and a million-man army just across the border is bad enough, but would you want your northern neighbor to be a radioactive dump site too?

Last month, North Korea threatened to sue Taiwan for breach of contract. There’s a man-bites-dog story: a country seeking the legal right to damage its own environment.

Taiwan has also tried to persuade China to take its nuclear waste. But politics intervened: China wants Taipower, Taiwan’s power agency, to say that Taiwan is part of China. Taiwan has explored the idea of stashing the nuke junk on one of its islands near China’s shores, but local Taiwanese and China’s Fujian Province, which lies across from Taiwan, rose up in arms.

Now we have the Marshall Islands. On Nov. 20, Taiwan announced with great fanfare the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Marshalls, the chain of Pacific atolls and tiny islands that the United States ran for years as a trust territory and used for nuclear testing. Skeptics here and Taiwan’s small Green Party claim the main motivation is that Taiwan hopes to turn the Marshalls into Taiwan’s nuke dump.

Taiwan’s foreign minister, Jason Hu, and Phillip Muller, his Marshall Islands counterpart, insist that nuclear wastes had nothing to do with their diplomacy. Still, within days, Taiwan energy officials revived old talk of turning the Marshalls into the dump site of their dreams.

It’s not just Taiwan that could use our fictitious Nimby Island. Plenty of other governments would love the idea.

Take the United States. Nimby could become the home for the transmitters of Radio Free Asia, the congressionally funded agency that beams news into such countries as China, Vietnam and North Korea, where the press is subject to censorship.

Over the last two years, several Asian countries have refused to let Radio Free Asia broadcast from their territory, largely for fear of irritating China. Thailand and the Philippines said no thanks. Even Australia, one of America’s closest allies, politely turned down the Clinton administration’s requests.

Radio Free Asia has had to operate with transmitters in Central Asia and with new facilities on the Pacific islands of Saipan and Tinian. But with repressive Asian regimes often trying to jam its programs, it can always use new sites. It’s a natural client for Nimby Island.

Of course, the biggest customers for Nimby could be the Pentagon and its Japanese Defense Agency friends. An artificial island might solve the problem of how to maintain American troops and bases in Asia.

For this purpose, the closest thing in real life to Nimby is the Japanese island of Okinawa. Of the 47,000 American troops stationed in Japan, about 27,000 are on Okinawa. Although the island has less than 1% of all the land in Japan, three-quarters of all U.S. bases in Japan are there.

The Americans view the bases in Japan as crucial to military strategy. The Pentagon’s new East Asia Strategy Report says the United States wants to maintain 100,000 troops in Asia for quite a while. On his recent visit to Tokyo, President Clinton put the matter quite bluntly.

“If we were to move our forces back to Guam or to Hawaii, it would take them much, much longer to come anywhere in the northeast Asia area if there were difficulties,” Clinton said.

The Japanese government wants the American forces around too--so long as most of them aren’t on Japan’s home islands. So the solution for years has been to stash the Americans on Okinawa. The only problem is that the Okinawans aren’t too crazy about the arrangement. In recent years, Okinawan Gov. Masahide Ota pushed hard for eventual removal of the American forces.

The U.S. and Japanese governments were delighted when Ota lost a bid for reelection a couple of weeks ago to a pragmatic, business-oriented governor, Keiichi Inamine.

But in his first meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi last week, the new governor made it clear that he isn’t ready to take orders from Tokyo about the American bases either. Maybe Nimby Island is the long-term solution for this problem too.

Douglas MacArthur once called Taiwan an unsinkable aircraft carrier. Now, Taiwan is looking for an unsinkable waste dump. And many others, it seems, have a need for a big new uninhabited Pacific island too. Sometimes, even Asia isn’t quite big enough.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space on Wednesdays.