ABSTRACT
The Japanese defence White Paper of 1976 noted that the military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union in Japan's region had shifted decisively in favour of the Soviet Union during the 1965-1975 period. From the Soviet perspective, one of the most ominous developments in the aftermath of the Korean War was Washington's evident determination to build up Japan as a countervailing force to Soviet power in the Far East. The superpower relationship in east Asia has its roots in the events of the much neglected Asian Cold War. The public emergence of the Sino–Soviet dispute in the early 1960s had surprisingly little impact at first on the image of monolithic, aggressive communism which underlay US foreign policy in Asia. The original view of North Korean decision was that it was arrived at during the two-month period when Mao Zedong was in Moscow negotiating the Sino–Soviet alliance treaty.
