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WASHINGTON: Japan and South Korea are both advanced industrial democracies with strong economies close to each other in Northeast Asia, and long-time allies of the United States. So why are their ballistic missile defense programs so radically diffferent?
Last week in BMD Focus, we cited reports from the respected Seoul newspaper, the Chosun Ilbo, that South Korean military planners had decided to create a Korean Air and Missile Defense command system to protect their country from ballistic missile threats. However, the reports made clear that the South Korean planners were taking a very different approach to the problem, primarily from neighboring North Korea, than Japanese defense planners across the Sea of Japan.
Japan and South Korea are both relatively small, densely populated nations. They are two of the most successful export-driven economies in the world and are both stable, democratic nations. They both have enviable huge trade surpluses. Yet they are taking radically different approaches to the challenge of creating effective BMD systems to protect their major centers of population. The reasons for this are deeply rooted in geography and historical experience.
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Japan over the past seven years has jumped into ballistic missile defense eagerly. South Korea is entering it reluctantly. Japan's BMD program is part of a bold and ambitious strategtic vision for revitalizing the nation's high-tech economy as well as defending its cities. That vision belonged above all to one man, Junichiro Koizumi, prime minsiter of Japan for five years until last September and potentially the nation's most important leader in the past half century.
Koizumi was inspired by his hero, Britain's war-time Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the importance of advanced technology defenses in preserving the island of Britain, almost exactly the same size as Japan, from destruction in the 1940 Battle of Britain. It was Japan's failure to have any comparable fighter aircraft and radar high-tech defenses that made it totally vulnerable to the firebombing of the U.S. Army Air Force XX Bomber Command under Gen. Curtis Le May in the terrible spring of 1945. At least 3 million people died as 23 cities were burned to the ground in the B-29 fire raids.
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