KEY POINTS:
Ships and planes from New Zealand and six other nations will gather in Japan this weekend as part of a continuing series of exercises by states that want to prevent weapons of mass destruction and related materials from being smuggled around the world by sea, air or land.
The Japanese Government will host the maritime interdiction training off its coast. It is being held under the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Australia, Britain, France, Singapore, the US and New Zealand will take part, with Japan. Other countries are being invited as observers.
China will be a notable absentee, as it was when Japan last hosted such an exercise in October 2004. But that should not be taken as a barometer of Sino-Japanese relations. In fact, they are better now than two years ago. Even military ties are becoming a bit more open. Japanese observers attended a military drill in China for the first time in September.
Nor does China's non-involvement in the security initiative signify that it is unconcerned about the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery. Such weapons include chemical and biological as well as nuclear weapons.
China has twice joined the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council in imposing sanctions on Iran and demanding that it halt uranium enrichment and other sensitive nuclear activities, despite Tehran's insistence that its work is peaceful. Beijing also condemned the nuclear explosion carried out by its nominal ally North Korea last October.
Indeed, not long after this test China joined Russia, the US and 10 other countries in signing a statement of principles that commits them to a series of individual and collective actions to prevent nuclear terrorism.
Unlike the PSI, a US-led project launched by President George W. Bush in 2003, the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT) was proposed jointly by Russia and the US in July last year.
Beijing is a founding member, able to help shape its evolution as more countries (at least 60 so far) join.
According to the US, more than 80 countries now participate in the security initiative in one way or another. But China, India, Indonesia and Malaysia remain wary of joining, partly because the US has not yet ratified the UN law of the sea treaty.
This raises concerns that the initiative may be used in ways that are contrary to international law, although there is no evidence of any such breach so far. Moreover, the initiative is a voluntary association. Participating countries are not obliged to halt a weapons of mass destruction shipment even if asked to do so by another member.
The main reason China will not join the PSI is that it fears this would prompt a North Korean walkout from the six-party talks to defuse the North Korean nuclear crisis. The talks are chaired by China but South Korea, too, has shied away from joining the PSI for the same reason as Beijing.
North Korea has condemned the security initiative as a US-led attempt impose a naval blockade and bring the regime in Pyongyang to its knees. From its inception, the initiative was widely seen to be aimed by the US at so-called nuclear rogue states such as North Korea and Iran.
The GICNT, however, is firmly focused on preventing terrorists, not states, from carrying out attacks using nuclear or radioactive material.
Since virtually all countries are against terrorism, China feels comfortable in signing on - even though it knows that the arrangement could be used in an emergency to block state-linked transfers of nightmare weapons material as well.
* The writer, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a security specialist at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.
