By Takao Yamada, Translated By Ryuichi Sato, March 25, 2012, Mainichi Shimbun, Japan"It cannot be said that Japan has no military intentions. At any time, programs involving the peaceful use of nuclear energy can be converted to military uses. In 1969, a senior Foreign Ministry research team produced a secret internal document advising that Japan's always maintain the economic and technological prowess to produce nuclear weapons... Japan already possesses 45 tons of enriched plutonium that could be converted to military use. That is enough to build about 4,000 'Nagasaki-type' bombs."
Japan - Mainichi Shimbun, Japan - Original Article (Japanese)
There are two types of atomic weapons. One is a uranium-based or a "Hiroshima-type" bomb, and the other is plutonium-based or a "Nagasaki-type" device. Iran claims to be stockpiling enriched uranium for peaceful purposes but is suspected of having nuclear ambitions. Japan also maintains a reserve of plutonium, but is not so suspected.
However, it cannot be said that Japan has no military intentions. The fact is that at any time, programs involving the peaceful use of nuclear energy can be converted to military uses. Nuclear power and the military are not mutually exclusive.
According to Akira Kurosaki, an associate professor at Fukushima University, a winner of the Suntory Prize for Social Science and the Humanities for his 2006 book Nuclear Weapons and Japan-U.S. Relations, in the 1960s, there is plenty of documentation showing an intent on the part of politicians and diplomats to try and turn Japan into a "potential nuclear weapons state" by promoting nuclear energy. The documents were drawn up when the nation's post-war nuclear policy was taking shape.
Eisaku Sato, Japan's prime minister at the time, enunciated his four nuclear policies: maintaining the three nuclear-free principles of not possessing, producing or permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan; relying on the American nuclear deterrent; promoting the peaceful use of nuclear power; and promoting nuclear disarmament.
However, the third policy of "promoting the peaceful use of nuclear power" carried with it a hidden intent to potentially possess nuclear weapons.
Prime Minister Sato strongly opposed China's 1964 nuclear weapons test and told U.S. Ambassador Edwin Reischauer that with its scientific and industrial prowess, Japan was fully capable of producing nuclear weapons of its own. It was in 1965, one year later, that Japan's first commercial nuclear plant in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, achieved criticality.
In 1969, a senior Foreign Ministry research team produced a secret internal document advising that Japan's always maintain the necessary economic and technological prowess to produce nuclear weapons. It was prepared shortly before the entry into force of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which allowed only the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China to possess nuclear weapons. The No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant was completed in 1970. In 1994, the Mainichi Shimbun was the first to report on this in-house Foreign Ministry document....
Apparently Japan was / is forgetting its own history - Hiroshima, Nagasaki - in developing their plans to take this route to become a de facto Nuclear Weapon State !Ak Malten, Pro Peaceful Energy Use
Some more info at:
Nuclear-Armed Japan is Not Out of the Question
at http://worldmeets.us/index.shtml
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