Re: [tlug] A-bomb service

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Lewske Wada writes:
 > On Jul 28, 2010, at 5:04 PM, CL wrote:
 > > How do you know Japan doesn't possess nuclear weapons?
 > > Just asking ...
 > 
 > I cannot tell in the future, but so far Japan has held the Three
 > Non- Nuclear Principles that prohibits possessing, producing or
 > carrying in nuclear weapons to the country.

Don't kid yourself.  You have no idea what Japan has or has not done
in this area.  Wasn't there just a big stink about a secret treaty
going back a few decades allowing U.S. vessels carrying nukes to pass
through Japanese waters and ports on their way to U.S. bases in Japan?
One that the LDP and the MFA denied the existence of on many
occasions?  You just *hope* Japan adheres to the other two principles,
but we *know* that one's long since been broken.  And *lied* about.

I don't think Japan owns any assembled nukes, and I doubt it has any
disassembled ones, either.  But we'll never know; this country has way
more than the necessary quantity of precision machining skills and
supercomputers to produce a testless Bomb.  Not to mention a large
number of nuclear reactors, including breeders, full of fissionables.
(Which get carried around in critical mass quantities in open buckets,
no doubt kanban-tsuki with appropriate IAEA papers!)  I bet folks like
Tamogami have thought about it, quite carefully....

The really sad thing is that Japan made a very large (though, like
Obama's Prague speech, entirely symbolic) contribution to world peace
in the last year.  Namely, the Hatoyama pledge to shoulder the burden
of a 25% reduction in Japan's carbon footprint by 2020.  This is the
first practical acknowledgement by one of the advanced countries that
we should bear a large burden (in proportion to relative populations)
of achieving carbon reductions, and it will be a talking point with
the large emerging economies like China and India over the next few
years (if Japan has the strength to follow through and not weasel on
the promise as it so often has done in the past).  But that doesn't
get any play.