NEW YORK, Nov 11: Alarm over North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapon programmes is pushing Japan toward joining the United States in trying to develop a missile defence programme, said the New York Times quoting Japanese officials and analysts

“We should exert efforts to get the programme to leave the research phase as soon as possible,” Japan’s Defence Agency chief, Shigeru Ishiba, told a Parliament committee last week, urging faster work with the United States on a programme that uses missiles to intercept other missiles.

The Times said that with parts of Japan only 350 miles away from North Korean territory, many Japanese have recently felt a surge in insecurity. First, North Korea admitted to a visiting American diplomat that it maintains a secret nuclear bomb programme. Then, last Tuesday, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman reacted to a breakdown in talks with Japan by saying that North Korea was “reconsidering” the moratorium on missile tests that it adopted after it test-fired a rocket over Japan in 1998.

“The impact of the news from North Korea has been strong,” Masashi Nishihara, president of the National Defence Academy, Japan’s interservice military college, told the paper . “North Korea has reversed its positions. That justifies us to move forward to develop missile defence, and to eventually deploy it.”