Some older articles regarding what Night Driver was referring to.....
For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/fu...nuclear-bomb-basement-china-isnt-happy-n48976
Japan Has Nuclear 'Bomb in the Basement,' and China Isn't Happy
by Robert Windrem
Mar 11 2014, 6:31 am ET
No nation has suffered more in the nuclear age than Japan, where atomic bombs flattened two cities in World War II and three reactors melted down at Fukushima just three years ago.
But government officials and proliferation experts say Japan is happy to let neighbors like China and North Korea believe it is part of the nuclear club, because it has a “bomb in the basement” -– the material and the means to produce nuclear weapons within six months, according to some estimates. And with tensions rising in the region, China’s belief in the “bomb in the basement” is strong enough that it has demanded Japan get rid of its massive stockpile of plutonium and drop plans to open a new breeder reactor this fall.
Japan signed the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which bans it from developing nuclear weapons, more than 40 years ago. But according to a senior Japanese government official deeply involved in the country’s nuclear energy program, Japan has been able to build nuclear weapons ever since it launched a plutonium breeder reactor and a uranium enrichment plant 30 years ago.
Related Story: Japan Producing Huge Stockpile of Plutonium
“Japan already has the technical capability, and has had it since the 1980s,” said the official. He said that once Japan had more than five to 10 kilograms of plutonium, the amount needed for a single weapon, it had “already gone over the threshold,” and had a nuclear deterrent.
Japan now has 9 tons of plutonium stockpiled at several locations in Japan and another 35 tons stored in France and the U.K. The material is enough to create 5,000 nuclear bombs. The country also has 1.2 tons of enriched uranium.
Technical ability doesn’t equate to a bomb, but experts suggest getting from raw plutonium to a nuclear weapon could take as little as six months after the political decision to go forward. A senior U.S. official familiar with Japanese nuclear strategy said the six-month figure for a country with Japan’s advanced nuclear engineering infrastructure was not out of the ballpark, and no expert gave an estimate of more than two years.
In fact, many of Japan’s conservative politicians have long supported Japan’s nuclear power program because of its military potential. “The hawks love nuclear weapons, so they like the nuclear power program as the best they can do,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. “They don’t want to give up the idea they have, to use it as a deterrent.”
Many experts now see statements by Japanese politicians about the potential military use of the nation’s nuclear stores as part of the “bomb in the basement” strategy, at least as much about celebrating Japan’s abilities and keeping its neighbors guessing as actually building weapons.
But pressure has been growing on Japan to dump some of the trappings of its deterrent regardless. The U.S. wants Japan to return 331 kilos of weapons grade plutonium – enough for between 40 and 50 weapons – that it supplied during the Cold War. Japan and the U.S. are expected to sign a deal for the return at a nuclear security summit next week in the Netherlands.
Yet Japan is sending mixed signals. It also has plans to open a new fast-breeder plutonium reactor in Rokkasho in October. The reactor would be able to produce 8 tons of plutonium a year, or enough for 1,000 Nagasaki-sized weapons.
China seems to take the basement bomb seriously. It has taken advantage of the publicity over the pending return of the 331 kilos to ask that Japan dispose of its larger stockpile of plutonium, and keep the new Rokkasho plant off-line. Chinese officials have argued that Rokkasho was launched when Japan had ambitious plans to use plutonium as fuel for a whole new generation of reactors, but that those plans are on hold post-Fukushima and the plutonium no longer has a peacetime use.
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."
Steve Fetter, formerly the Obama White House’s assistant director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, thinks China's concerns are not purely political.
"I've had private discussions with China in which they ask, 'Why does Japan have all this plutonium that they have no possible use for?' I say they made have made a mistake and are left with a huge stockpile," said Fetter, now a professor at the University of Maryland. "But if you were distrustful, then you see it through a different lens."
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. "Nodong is a Japan weapon," said Spector.
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.S. would flatten it"-- and thus China is the country Japanese officials, particularly the right, want to impress with their minimal deterrence.
But experts also note that another nation in the region seems to have been impressed by the Japanese “bomb in the basement” strategy, not as a threat but as a model.
There are fears that if Japan opens the Rakkosho plant, it will encourage South Korea to go the same route as its neighbor. The U.S. and South Korea have been negotiating a new civilian nuclear cooperation pact. The South wants to reprocess plutonium, but the U.S. is resisting providing cooperation or U.S. nuclear materials.
Jeffrey Lewis believes that the South Koreans want to emulate Japan, and says there is a “bigger bomb constituency in South Korea , about 10 to 20 percent [of the population],” than in Japan.
"The least of my concerns is that Japan would get a nuclear weapon," said Fetter. "But China and South Korea will use this as an excuse, each in their own way."
And, in fact, not everyone believes that Japan COULD go all the way. 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 wrote recently that Japan has more levels of nuclear bureaucracy than it once had, as well as more potential “veto players” inside that bureaucracy because of Fukushima. He said that any attempt to make a bomb would be "swamped by the intrusion of other powerful actors with very different motivations."
Still, even without a bomb, Japan has achieved a level of nuclear deterrence without building a bomb and suffering sanctions. That may be a more impressive achievement than actually building a bomb.
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For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/26/if-japan-wanted-to-build-a-nuclear-bomb-itd-be-awesome-at-it/
Voice
If Japan Wanted to Build a Nuclear Bomb It’d Be Awesome at It
But let's all take a deep breath: Tokyo may be dumb, but it's not stupid.
By Jeffrey Lewis
June 26, 2014
So, it seems that Japan lost a little bit of plutonium. Cue the outrage! Well, not lost, exactly. The Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) submits a voluntary declaration to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that documents exactly how much plutonium the nation has stockpiled. For fundamentally clerical reasons, the JAEA accidentally omitted the 640 kg plutonium contained in a load of fuel at a nuclear power plant. The material was never unsafeguarded or misplaced.
Japan is the only non-nuclear weapons state with significant holdings of civil plutonium. Given the historical animosities, Japan’s plutonium stockpile is something that understandably makes its neighbors a bit nervous — maybe even a little crazy. So, for example, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed to return some poorly guarded weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium to the United States that had been used for research, the international reaction was not relief. It was: YOU HAD WHAT?
I am a critic of Japan’s policy of separating and reusing the plutonium inevitably created in the country’s nuclear power plants. Japan’s stockpile of plutonium sets a terrible example for other states like, say, Iran. Still, we should not lose sight of the fact that Japan is not going to build nuclear weapons.
Much of the concern expressed by Japan’s neighbors is simply a convenient opportunity to give Prime Minister Abe a kick in the shins. And, frankly, he probably deserves more than a few kicks in areas north of the shins for stunts like visiting the Yasukuni shrine and throwing shade at the women raped by the Imperial Japanese Army.
Yet the notion of Japanese nuclear weapons keeps turning up. The idea has gotten some attention in light of the general combativeness of the most recent International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Shangri-La Dialogue (I am trademarking "The Brou-ha-ha in Shang-ri-la"), where Chinese participants acted boorishly, as well as an interesting debate between my friends David Santoro and Elbridge Colby about whether the United States should ditch Asian allies that leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in search of the bomb.
These are important discussions, but they give the wrong impression. Focusing on the unlikely possibility of a nuclear-armed Japan distracts from more important policy challenges that threaten the shared interests of the United States and Japan in arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation.
Don’t get me wrong, there will always be a certain constituency within Japan for extremist views. Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo, has made a career out of saying impolitic things, including his infamous book, The Japan That Can Say No — say "no" to the United States, that is. Ishihara says "yes" to nuclear weapons and a bunch of other terrible ideas, from purchasing the islands at the center of the maritime dispute with China to suggesting that sexual enslavement was "a very good way of making a living" for a young woman in wartime.
There have always been extremists in Japan who aren’t one bit sorry about the war. Take Ishihara’s buddy, the late Yukio Mishima. Three times nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature, Mishima was also an actor who later in life got into extremist right-wing causes, body-building, and so on. In 1970, he and some of his young acolytes in a student militia called the Tatenokai entered the military base in Ichigaya and exhorted the soldiers to launch a coup to restore the emperor. The soldiers looked on, sort of baffled — some accounts say they even heckled him — and then Mishima retired to an office to commit seppuku, or ritual suicide. The plan was that Mishima would stab himself in the stomach and then one of the students, alleged to be his lover, would behead the well-known author. The lop job didn’t go exactly as anticipated: The poor fool botched it a couple of times, leaving another student to finish off Misihima. Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, who knew Mishima socially, said, "I can only think he went out of his mind." So, yes, there are weirdos in Japan. (And elsewhere: Someone pinned Mishima’s severed head on Pinterest.)
As an American, I can tell you that it’s not fair to judge a country by its nut-jobs. A far larger and more important constituency in Japan are the people who categorize the devastation of World War II as a catastrophe, the post-war reconstruction as a miracle, and the existence of nuclear weapons as abhorrent. This is the Japan of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Hello Kitty. (Oops.)
It’s easy to talk about Japan building nuclear weapons, but the real policy debates reflect Japan’s nuclear allergy, not enthusiasm. In late 1969, a few months before Mishima killed himself, the United States agreed to return Okinawa to Japanese control. The sticking point between Tokyo and Washington was whether U.S. bases would continue to host American nuclear weapons or not. Ultimately, the United States relented to Japan’s demand for an Okinawa without nuclear weapons, although Prime Minister Sato agreed to consult with the United States in the event of a crisis. (Sato is Abe’s maternal great-uncle, by the way.) Even that agreement, however, had to be signed in secret. After signing the official memorandum to return Okinawa to Japan, then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and his Japanese counterpart actually contrived for U.S. President Richard Nixon to invite Sato into the president’s study to look at some objets d’art so they could sign the secret agreement without anyone present.
This is hardly ancient history. In 2010, when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) finally took sole control of the government for the first time in post-war Japan, it ordered an inquiry into secret agreements like the one Sato signed. (The Japanese copy was found by Sato’s son, who would be Abe’s first cousin once-removed, if you are keeping score.) The DPJ calculated, correctly, that secret agreements to allow U.S. nuclear weapons to enter Japan would outrage a good portion of the public. The result was an ugly spat between the Obama administration and the DPJ government. The Japanese public, by and large, thinks what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a terrible thing. I am a member (that’s my head!) of the Governor of Hiroshima’s roundtable on disarmament. Let me tell you, nuclear weapons are not a vote winner in Japan.
Nor, I hasten to add, is Japan "six months away" from a bomb, even if you hear that all the time. Recently some senior U.S. officials repeated the "six month" claim to NBC reporter Robert Windrem. There is no technical basis for such a statement. I once actually tried to trace the heritage of that irksome claim. As far as I could tell, it dates to a conversation with a "Japanese strategic thinker" in 1976 that is cited in Richard Halloran’s 1991 book, Chrysanthemum and Sword Revisited: Is Japanese Militarism Resurgent? The claim is made in passing, not as a formal assessment of Japan’s technological capability or plans. "Six months" in context is like the biblical "40" — that is to say, it means "fairly soon" just like "40 days and 40 nights" means it rained a long, long time.
Other than one bit of yellow journalism in the Sunday Times, no one has attempted to document a technical basis for the "six-month" claim. There have been several Japanese and American assessments, from academic studies to declassified intelligence reports, on the possibility that Japan might build nuclear weapons. All of them conclude that a nuclear deterrent would cost Japan a few billion dollars and would take several years to build.
That’s because the Japanese would not jury-rig a tiny arsenal out of civil plutonium. They could do it, sure, but why? Why completely alter the structure of Japanese security policy for a handful of makeshift bombs that might not work? If Japan goes nuclear, it will do so only as part of a fundamental change in how the Japanese look at their security environment. In that case, Japan would build nuclear weapons like they do everything else, down to the beer machine at Narita — with meticulous care. Japan would construct dedicated plutonium production reactors and facilities to separate weapons-grade plutonium, probably conduct nuclear tests, and deploy modern delivery systems, such as missiles.
This is, I would argue, the most important point to understanding U.S.-Japan relations, and extended deterrence. We often talk about nuclear weapons in Japan like a thermostat — if U.S. credibility declines in Tokyo, Japan will build a nuclear arsenal to compensate. It’s almost as if we cut 10 bombs, the Japanese will want 10 of their own to make up the difference. That’s not right at all. For Japan, becoming a nuclear weapons power would require a dramatic break in a foreign and security policy that has historically centered on the U.S. alliance. So would unarmed neutrality. It is Japan’s lack of such strategic options that account for the most interesting Japanese behaviors in foreign and security policy.
As one Japanese observer pointed out to me, neither alternative — nuclear-armed independence nor unarmed neutrality — has a mainstream constituency in Japan. That means the only practical approach for Japanese policymakers is an alliance with the United States. Tokyo has little choice but to accept whatever level of security Washington can provide at the moment. Another colleague compared it to riding on the back of a motorcycle — you can see the bumps and twists in the road, but you can’t do anything about it. That’s scary. The result, of course, is a lot of whining from Japan about the credibility of the U.S. guarantee. What else can they do? And it accounts for the tendency of the country’s politicos to fixate on symbols of Washington’s commitment, just as Max Weber observed that Protestants tended to obsess about material success as a sign of predestination.
This is the downside of kicking Japan over its stockpile of plutonium. Abe’s historical revisionism is about making Japan a victim, rather than a contrite member of the international community. Yes, Japan’s plutonium policies are an unwelcome precedent for countries that don’t have its same allergy to nuclear weapons. But accusing the Japanese of harboring a secret ambition for nuclear-armed militarism only reinforces Abe’s nonsense about foreign criticism of Japan and makes it harder for sensible Japanese voices to push back. It exacerbates the underlying anxiety that the United States will abandon Japan — only making it harder for the two countries to work together to beat back the bomb.
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ETA: I wonder how Japanese public opinion will react when North Korea proves they can put a nuke onto their missiles.
ETA 2: Lewis is assuming that the Japanese haven't already done the engineering for an implosion system. Recall my past comments about 1940s munitions engineering and that we're talking about a country that not only has a space program, but has done an asteroid rendezvous, sample collection and return to Earth mission.
