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?

Let's take a quick look at Japan's stockpile of nuclear materials. According to the data released by the Atomic Energy Commission of Japan, Japan possessed 44.3 tons of plutonium in 2012, of which 9.3 tons were stockpiled at home and 35 tons kept abroad in countries such as the United Kingdom and France. This even exceeds the 38 tons of weapons-grade plutonium the US previously claimed to hold. By the standard that 8 kilograms of plutonium are needed to produce a nuclear weapon, Japan's stockpile is enough for more than 5,000 nuclear weapons, an arsenal that is large enough to wipe out life on Earth.

In addition, Japan has a competitive nuclear power industry and one of the most advanced civilian nuclear programs worldwide, which has laid a solid technological foundation for its manufacture of nuclear weapons. The country also boasts various types of nuclear reactors and the centrifuge techniques needed for the uranium enrichment process. All the aforementioned can be converted into military use to accommodate the changes in Japan's nuclear policies.

It is impossible for a country to produce nuclear weapons without conducting weapon tests. However, given its possession of world-class supercomputers and its competence in inertial confine fusion, or ICF, a type of fusion energy research that attempts to initiate nuclear fusion reactions, Japan is highly capable of conducting simulated tests and is thus able to produce a nuclear weapon and guarantee its effectiveness, yield and explosive capabilities without actual physical testing.