Taiwan wo meguru Anzen Hosho [Taiwan’s security: issues and prospects]

disarmament.” However, the above similarity between North Korea and China will be dismissed by the “illicit nuclear aspirant” theory, because China’s nuclear development eventually became lawful under the NPT. Other nuclear proliferators such as Israel, which never signed the NPT, would also be excluded from comparative analysis based on this book’s view because the authors stressed that the North Korea and Iran commonly signed the NPT as the reason for selecting their cases for comparison. Nevertheless, why do the compared countries that are proliferating nuclear weapons have to be at least onetime signatories of the NPT? The frequent combination of “North Korea and Iran in US strategic thinking” (pages 2–7) also does not constitute enough of a reason to classify the two nuclear proliferators into one category, excluding others. The concept of categorizing proliferators should depend on objective analysis rather than political discourse, even if the relevance of such an objective could be defined based on a tendency of “U.S. strategic thinking.”