According to the Hankyoreh Shinmun, the South Korean government is very concerned that North Korea’s nuclear test may prompt Japan to go nuclear herself. Seoul is now weighing its options should Tokyo choose to arm itself with nuclear weapons.
A Korean official told the newspaper on Thursday that Seoul didn’t believe Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso’s comment about the importance of debating the nuclear option was an accident, and that South Korea was seriously considering its options to respond to Japan going nuclear.
The official also said Japan has been discussing the development of nuclear weapons since February of last year, when North Korea declared to the world it possessed nuclear weapons. He also claimed that Japanese officials met with U.S. intelligence officials in the summer, when signs appeared that North Korea might test a nuke, and warned them that if Pyongyang carried out a test, there would be strong calls in Japan to arm itself with nuclear weapons.
The Hankyoreh noted that Seoul suspects that the hidden motivation behind Japan’s hardline stance against North Korea is Tokyo’s desire to rationalize arming itself with nuclear weapons.
And silly me, here I was thinking it had something to do with Pyongyang kidnapping Japanese citizens, firing missiles at and over Japan, testing nuclear weapons, smuggling drugs into Japan, pouring onto Japan venomous rhetoric and generally going out of its way to make Tokyo feel insecure.
BTW, a South Korean lawmaker said yesterday that Seoul has the ability to start churning out nuclear weapons using enriched uranium within a year.
10 Comments
Japan already has nukes. It just does not advertize the fact.
About twenty years ago, a ship loaded with nuclear material disappeared from high sea. All experts agree it was Japan who took the load.
That was twenty years ago. Do you think the Japanese would just shit around the material? They have about twenty times more capability than NK.
KJI’d better be careful about f***ing around with Japan. He will leave no bones to bury. He and his Gipumjo will evaporate from the surface of the earth.
The same is true with SK hicks who think that Japan is weak. No way, Josei. Even the combined Koreas will have less Navy and Airforce capability than Japan. And, Rice goes to Japan promising she will defend the country. Whoop-di-doo!
Japan will fight China for the Asian championship in less than ten years. Both countries will be totally destroyed. The eventual winner will be the USA. Go USA!
SK? Fools die.
Fools die indeed.
Where’ve you been Mr. Baduk?
Let’s see…which nation is more likely to fire nukes at the other…hmm…which nations have, respectively, a government of shoe-throwing hotheads and one of the world’s largest armies…hmm….
aigo, baduk.
if the norks do keep pushing, japan will go nuclear (if they aren’t already). i think that the timing is optimal for this. the noh-nothings will lose both koreas to china or the US.
go USA!
It’s as if you live next to an insane neighbor who steals money, kicks your dog and stockpiles handguns. The guy across the street has been cordial, if impersonal, and occasionally lends you a cup of sugar (though his father was an SOB and tried to take your house). Your neighbor threatens you with a shotgun. Do you immediately start screaming at the guy across the street?
Also, in response to Baduk, I note that only Americans would send Rice to Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_rice
Well… Japan may as well do something with the several tons of plutonium it has lying around.
The Japanese Prime minister has just said that this isn’t on the agenda. They’re not going to discuss it anytime soon.
I thought I had read somewhere that Japan can have nukes ready in one month. So when they are talking about going nuclear, they are only talking about whether to have nuclear weapons now–not whether to set up some program from scratch. Everything is in place.
Actually, I agree with Baduk on this one. Japan and South Korea probably have nukes.
(By the way, Korea had a nuclear program in the 70s and Japan had one in the 40s.)
It’s not was if we are talking about cutting edge technology. The Manahattan project was over 60 years ago.
The key to making an atomic bomb is knowing how to calculate critical mass. The rest is just a matter of producing a more effective and powerful explosion. Heck, you can find all that information on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N....._materials
(This information was still strictly controled just a few years ago. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t a Physics professor at the University of Toronto fired in the early 1990’s for teaching how a sophomore class how to calculate critical mass and make a bomb?)
The key to making an atomic bomb is knowing how to calculate critical mass. The rest is just a matter of producing a more effective and powerful explosion. Heck, you can find all that information on Wikipedia.
Calculating the critical mass is just a physics textbook exercise. That’s the easy part.
The most difficult part of constructing a nuke is the actual, nitty-gritty, trial-and-error, getting-your-hands-dirty engineering problems like enriching uranium to obtain a certain percentage of pure isotopes using either centrifuges or cascaded filters. The physical design methodology of the warhead and fuse mechanism are disciplines in their own right in the art of building the bomb. The design is also a function of the delivery system, is it going to be mounted inside a missile or carried by a bomber or a submarine?
In the indeterminate future, when the dust has settled, Korea has been unified, USFK is no longer present in Korea, and all this has become a distant memory, it would be highly fascinating to compare the hidden story of the people involved and the effort that went into the NK nuke project and compare it with that of the original Manhattan Project.
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[...] Bei The Marmot’s Hole verfolgt man die Sorgen der südkoreanischen Regierung ob einer japanischen nuklearen Bewaffnung als Folge der Atomtests Pyöngyangs. Autor Robert Koehler hält den Verdacht, dass japanische nationalistische Kreise die Situation nur ausnutzen würden, um das Land nuklear zu bewaffnen, für kompletten Unfug: “And silly me, here I was thinking it had something to do with Pyongyang kidnapping Japanese citizens, firing missiles at and over Japan, testing nuclear weapons, smuggling drugs into Japan, pouring onto Japan venomous rhetoric and generally going out of its way to make Tokyo feel insecure.” [...]