I touched on the problems of Japanese nuclear security in an earlier post, but one thing I did not discuss was that Japan already has a large stockpile of plutonium and uranium, not only stored in Japan itself, but in France and Britain. This plutonium was supplied to Japan by the United States during the Cold War, and it appears that Japan will be handing them back.
This is without a doubt a very good thing. Just as an Iranian nuclear bomb is bad for global peace as it could spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, a Japanese nuke would be a possible spark towards creating a arms race in the even more vital East Asia. North Korea is already dangerous enough – South Korea, which doesn’t particularly trust the United States to begin with, having nukes on their own would do nothing for the sake of stability. It should be noted, however, that despite this transfer, Japan has without a doubt the scientific and technological know-how to make a nuclear bomb within a time frame of 6 months to 2 years should it so desire, but there is really nothing which can be done about that.
East Asia Thought 