One Wonders Why It Took So Long

A nuclear armed Japan may be around the corner

"Frayed relations with China and Russia, the ever-present threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and a re-examination of the 1960 U.S.-Japan security treaty, formally known as the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, has some in the Japanese government and military considering what would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, Japan entering the club of nations possessing nuclear weapons.

Since Japan was the only nation to have suffered from the wartime use of nuclear weapons -- the dropping of U.S. atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, there is a strong anti-nuclear feeling among the Japanese people. But it noteworthy that Japan had two nascent programs to build an atomic bomb during World War II -- the Army’s Ni-Go project and the Navy’s F-Go program. In the 1960s, the Lyndon Johnson administration pressured the Eisaku Sato government to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty amid fears that Sato was pushing for a Japanese nuclear weapons capability to counter that of China."

Sure, we always hear that canard about the Japanese people loath to have anything to do with nukes because they were on the receiving end in WW2. But an even stronger case can be made to acquire them because they know first hand what that was all about and should never want to experience that horror again. Really, the Japanese in every respect are on par technologically with all nuclear armed nations; they could have them overnight if they don't have them already and given that they're surrounded by regimes with the bomb, why shouldn't they have a few? And given that the US is a deteriorating, sick and dying ally with increasingly testy relations with Japan, it's just a matter of time.

"With the U.S. increasingly seen by Japanese military and foreign policy policy-makers as an overextended and failing superpower, some elements in the Japanese government and think tanks feel that the only way Japan can be self-assured over its defense is for the country to amend its constitution and laws to allow for the introduction of nuclear weapons for the Japanese Self-Defense Force."