Japanese nuclear weapons program

In February, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua published a commentary that said if a country "hoards far more nuclear materials than it needs, including a massive amount of weapons grade plutonium, the world has good reason to ask why.

For at least four or five years, said Leonard Spector, deputy director of the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterey, the Japanese plutonium stockpile has been mentioned as a threat in Chinese defense white papers. Japan, of course, has its own security concerns with China and North Korea. North Korea's nuclear weapons program is a direct threat to Japan.

Some of its Nodong missiles, with a range capability of hitting anywhere in Japan, are believed to be nuclear-armed. There have been confrontations between China and Japan over small islands north of Taiwan. The dispute has recently escalated.

In October, state-controlled media in China warned "a war looms following Japan's radical provocation," Tokyo's threat to shoot down Chinese drones. Most experts agree that China is the greater threat, because as one expert said, "If North Korea attacked Japan, the U.

There are fears that if Japan opens the Rakkosho plant, it will encourage South Korea to go the same route as its neighbor. The South wants to reprocess plutonium, but the U. Jacques Hymans, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, believes the process would be thwarted by what he calls "veto players," that is, government officials who would resist a secret program and reveal it before it reached fruition.

He said that any attempt to make a bomb would be "swamped by the intrusion of other powerful actors with very different motivations. However, the military commitment wasn't backed with adequate resources, and the Japanese effort to an atomic bomb had made little progress by the end of the war. Japan's nuclear efforts were disrupted in April when a B raid damaged Nishina's thermal diffusion separation apparatus. Some reports claim the Japanese subsequently moved their atomic operations Konan Hungnam, now part of North Korea.

The Japanese may have used this facility for making small quantities of heavy water. The Japanese plant was captured by Soviet troops at war's end, and some reports claim that the output of the Hungnam plant was collected every other month by Soviet submarines. Although possession of nuclear weapons is not forbidden in the constitution, Japan, as the only nation to experience the devastation of atomic attack, expressed its abhorrence of nuclear arms early on and determined never to acquire them.

The Basic Atomic Energy Law of limits research, development, and utilization of nuclear power to peaceful uses, and beginning in , national policy has embodied "three non-nuclear principles"--forbidding the nation to possess or manufacture nuclear weapons or to allow them to be introduced into the nation.

The notion was formalized by the Japanese Diet on November 24, In Japan ratified the Nuclear Non-Prolifeation Treaty NPT , adopted by the United Nations Security Council in , and reiterated its intention never to "develop, use, or allow the transportation of nuclear weapons through its territory. Japan lacks significant domestic sources of energy except coal and must import substantial amounts of crude oil, natural gas, and other energy resources, including uranium.

Japan's nuclear output nearly doubled between and , as Japan attempted to move away from dependence on oil following the Arab oil embargo. The clock is ticking down. They often pop up on street corners in Tokyo, yelling at passersby, determined to jolt their fellow Japanese from a pacifist slumber. Beware China! Crush North Korea! Revere the fallen empire! His weekends are devoted to right-wing campaigning. On this crisp, Sunday morning, Seiji is driving a van painted bone white.

There are red suns emblazoned on both sides. His aforementioned great leader is riding shotgun, rolling cigarettes and rifling through a box of cassette tapes. These men long to revive the once-mighty Japanese empire. Once powerful enough to lord over much of China and the Koreas, this imperium was robbed of its glory in by a bomb erupting over Nagasaki that contained 14 pounds of plutonium.

This is the greatest accomplishment ever by an occupying force. Igarashi is blessed with ursine heft. Earlier, when we shook hands, his rough hands swallowed mine.

He works in construction. The rest of his crew are all blue-collar guys, as well. Igarashi is still selecting the perfect, imperial anthem from his box of tapes. Related: Why Trump failed to convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, and how he can do better at the next summit.

When nationalists such as Igarashi peer out from Japan, they see danger in every direction. That scenario is actually unlawful — and any Japanese high school student can tell you why. It forbids the nation from ever building a military or going to war.

Yet, these forces are still forbidden by the constitution from attacking targets away from Japanese soil — even when facing a direct threat. That remains the job of the United States, which maintains bases strewn across the islands.

But as we turn a corner onto a smaller street, Igarashi twists the volume knob. About 10 minutes later, we arrive at their destination: a wide-open plaza next to a busy subway stop. A nearly identical white van pulls up, and now the whole crew — all seven guys — are hopping out to unfurl flags, some emblazoned with the imperial rising sun. One man scrambles onto the roof and drapes banners over the side.

Igarashi, tying a white bandana around his brow, sets expectations before the show begins. That one person will go home, talk to their family and help bring on the awakening of the Japanese people. Perhaps even that modest goal is overly ambitious. For the next few hours, Igarashi and his men take turns pacing on the roof of their vans, shouting into a microphone plugged into a rack of loudspeakers.

Out on the concrete plaza, there are hundreds within earshot at any given time. There are an estimated , members of far-right groups in Japan. But their followers amount to a speck within a population of million people, most of whom are widely assumed to embrace pacifism. Bad idea, says professor Koichi Nakano. There are still red lines, Nakano says.