Japan has nuclear weapons capability

While the world is wondering what the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit, held on Monday and Tuesday in The Hague, the Netherlands, will achieve, Tokyo is busy working on a draft statement, due to be considered in a nuclear disarmament meeting in Hiroshima next month, aimed at urging China to engage in nuclear arms reduction talks with the United States and Russia. As a driving force behind the efforts to pressure China, Japan is choosing to ignore the gap between the size of China's nuclear arsenal and those of the US and Russia, which are by far the largest in the world.

For years, Japanese society has had mixed feelings about nuclear, stuck between the actual demand for nuclear power and the painful memories tied to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and more recently the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster). The question is whether the government will be able to overcome the public's reluctance to find its way into the nuclear weapon club.

Technically speaking, a country has to meet several requirements to become a nuclear weapon state: It needs possession of highly enriched plutonium and uranium, and the technologies needed for the manufacture of nuclear weapons and the delivery technologies and systems used to bring a nuclear weapon to its target, and last but not least, it needs the political determination to develop a nuclear arsenal. So has Japan met all these requirements?