Hailed at its birth in 1960 as democracy's best hope in Africa, Nigeria succumbed to yet another military takeover on December 31, 1983. Of particular anguish is the fact that the coup reverses the celebrated constitution of 1979, when Nigeria redeemed democracy from the ashes of violent political breakdown, military intervention, assassination, and civil war. Now events are bound to confirm the all too general impression that in Africa authoritarian rule is inevitable.

Threats to the security of Japan and the world are manifold, but for Japan the "enemy" is war.

For thirty years a United States bearing global strategic responsibility and a Japan committed to "no war/no collective security" have, despite apparent differences and frequent setbacks, collaborated so successfully that East Asia has become the growth miracle of the developing world. During these years the backdrop for Japan's strategic calculations—and its hesitations—has been its concept of "Comprehensive National Security." It is important, then, for us in the West to understand just what this concept means.

In June, 1976, U.S. Ambassador Francis Meloy and his economic counselor were assassinated in Beirut by Palestinian sympathizers. In August, 1980, as U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean was driving to his residence in a suburb of Lebanon's capital, his bullet-proof car was riddled with machine-gun fire—this attempt on his life later claimed by the "Front for the Liberation of Lebanon From Foreigners," a right-wing and pro-Christian group that accused the U.S. of aiding the Palestinians. Between 1978 and 1982 factions tied to Palestinian guerrillas fired rockets at the U.S. embassy on four separate occasions. In April, 1983, the bombing of the embassy, took a toll of sixty-three lives; the first group to claim "credit" was a littleknown pro-Iranian faction

In May, 1974, the Indian Government detonated a "peaceful nuclear explosion." The device contained heavy water supplied by the United States and plutonium that had been reprocessed from the spent fuel of a research reactor supplied by Canada. That event shocked the governments involved in international nuclear commerce into greater efforts to prevent the diversion of civil nuclear assistance to military purposes. By 1976, France and West Germany had joined the United States in pledging not to export facilities for the production of plutonium. Two years later the major suppliers agreed upon guidelines intended to ensure that international safeguards would be applied to all sensitive nuclear exports.