Japan’s rise as a nuclear power

Philippine and Asian policymakers are keeping tabs on Japan’s new nationalism which is dramatically altering its foreign and security policies.

Last month, the reemergence of Japan as a global military power was underscored by new legislation “reinterpreting” its pacifist constitution and affirming its right to exercise collective self-defense.

Responding to opposition protests, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe contends that the laws are vital to Japan’s security amid growing threats of a belligerent China and an unstable North Korea. His stance has swiftly found resonance in Washington, where US policymakers have been pushing Japan, as a democratic and revitalized partner, to assume a greater role in maintaining international peace and security while, at the same time, relieving enormous pressures on the Pentagon’s resources.

Over the last half-century, Japan was “an economic giant but a diplomatic dwarf,” in David Pilling’s words. That will change soon enough as Japan maneuvers to join the exclusive nuclear club of China, North Korea, India and Pakistan in this part of the world.

Japan’s nuclear ambition has long been held in check both by its pacifist mood and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which bans it from developing and producing nuclear weapons.

Nonetheless, even before Prime Minister Eisaku Sato came to power in 1964, Japan’s industrial-military elite had been chafing at the bit, making quiet but sporadic demands for the country to acquire nuclear weapons. In 1968, a prescient Sato succeeded in stipulating that if American assurance were removed or seemed unreliable, Japan had the choice to go nuclear.

Without a nuclear deterrence capability, Japan has been an anomaly in the ranks of the superpowers. It remains a second-class military power in spite of its status as a global economic colossus with worldwide trade and interests to protect.

Albert Axelbank, in his 1972 book “Black Star Over Japan,” focused on the country’s rising forces of militarism. In that year when China was still recovering from the vicissitudes of its Cultural Revolution, Japan already had a well-subsidized space program, a nuclear-powered vessel and satellites in space—indicators that it had a workable nuclear weapons delivery system. Ten years later, it constructed its first plutonium breeder reactor and a uranium enrichment plant.

Given the current geopolitical flux in the region, it would seem wholly illogical for Japan to forgo the nuclear option. The question is: How long would it take Japan to build its own nuclear deterrent?

It already has an estimated stockpile of nine tons of plutonium and 1.2 tons of enriched uranium, excluding another 35 tons stored in France and the United Kingdom. The material is enough to create 5,000 nuclear bombs as it takes only five to 10 kilograms of plutonium to make a single weapon.

Experts opine that once a political decision to go forward is made, Japan’s advanced nuclear engineering infrastructure can produce nuclear weapons within a year. Others contend that it may happen in six months.

In war planning, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) usually considers China its main security threat. With militant China frenziedly claiming broad swaths of the East and South China Seas to create a “new oceanic order,” that is a rational view. And with Beijing rapidly expanding and modernizing its military capability, it would not be surprising if the SDF has secretly prepositioned materials and delivery systems to slash the production and delivery timetable for a nuclear device.

China’s military, in terms of troops and firepower, is far more massive than Japan’s. Even without the United States as an ally, however, Japan’s smaller military has a qualitative and technological edge over China.

Global experts believe that China’s maritime forces lag behind Japan’s by two decades. And starting in early 2017, Japan will be supplied with squadrons of US F-35s, the latest generation of fighter jets armed with missiles capable of devastating the Liaoning, China’s lone aircraft carrier, from a safe distance of 290 kilometers.

Japan has 48 existing nuclear reactors (the United States has 100, and China 23) for power generation. Pronuclear sentiments have led Japan to build the world’s third largest fleet of nuclear reactors. Its newest and most imposing facility is at Rokkasho on Japan’s northeast coast, a fast-breeder plutonium reactor. Designed to fuel the country’s future nuclear power plants, it has the capability to convert its nuclear technology into nuclear warheads.

The inescapable point is that Japan’s new security policy is bound to redraw the strategic map of Asia. Prime Minister Abe has the unique opportunity to reshape Japan as a great economic and military power—a Japan that can project power to defend itself and its allies as well as a Japan that can forge strategic and far-reaching alliances across the globe.

That is the path that a triumphalist Tokyo should take to reassure allies and potential foes alike that peace and prosperity remain its abiding goals.

Rex D. Lores ([email protected]) is a member of the Center for Philippine Futuristic Studies.