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Why China Is Worried About Japan's Plutonium Stocks
Lasrick (2629253) writes A fascinating account of why China is so worried about Japan's excessive plutonium stocks: combined with its highly sophisticated missile program, "Chinese nuclear-weapons specialists emphasize that Japan has everything technically needed to make nuclear weapons." It turns out that Japan has under-reported a sizable amount of plutonium, and there have been increasing signs that the country might be moving toward re-militarization. This is a particularly worrying read about nuclear tensions in Asia.
Not too worried about Japan... I wouldn't cut off their fuel supply however.
China worried about the logical consequences of its own provocations against Japan as well as failing to heel those of North Korea (who essentially only China has open lines of communication).
A lot more people died from conventional bombs in WWII than nuclear ones, even in Japan, and we're all still building and dropping those.
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And, yet, China seems to be the one annexing islands and redefining boundaries.
By some standards, China is more or less invading both Japan and Vietnam now.
Who is the bigger threat? The closed communist government whose every public statement is a deluded fit of lies gets my vote. Have you ever read a press release out of China? It reads like bad fiction written by a delusional psychotic.
Maybe if China is 'worried' about Japan, they need to look at their own actions and understand why Japan might be feeling the need to be able to protect themselves.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The idea that Japan could enrich plutonium and turn it into nuclear weapons, which China is trying to push here, is full of "mights". Their logic is essentially:
- Japan didn't report 640kg of Mixed Oxide Fuel in an offline reactor because they didn't believe they had to. MOX is useless for making nuclear weapons by itself without further processing.
- Plutonium can be extracted from MOX, and Japan is doing this, but they reported all of the plutonium they extracted from MOX to the IAEA.
- Japan has a surplus stock of plutonium that they're not really supposed to have, but this is understandable given that plutonium is probably a pain to move around, and they have plans to use it as fuel in breeder reactors in the future.
- Japan has shown no inclination to produce nuclear weapons outside of a few studies, all of which are well over a decade old and have been known about for years.
- In China's mind, all of these things, which are circumstantial at best, indicate that Japan MIGHT be considering the production of nuclear weapons.
From what it sounds like, Japan could've had nuclear weapons years ago if they really wanted to. China merely doesn't want them to have the capability because it means they'd have a much harder time bullying Japan over things like the Senkaku islands.
Everybody in the modern world should get out of bed every morning and thank $deity for Harry Truman's decision to drop those two little bombs. If the world hadn't seen firsthand what those bombs were capable of, we certainly would have found another excuse to try them out, lots and lots more, with much bigger yields. Maybe Korea, maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis, maybe Viet Nam; first a "tactical" nuke or two, then an all-out exchange. Harry Truman should be sainted.
China is still a little sensitive regarding military actions of Japan
All it takes is one charismatic mad-man.....
Japan is a little sensitive about China sitting on dozens of ICBM's and claiming a large part of the western Pacific Ocean as their own.
All it takes is one prudent leader.
It's not really much plutonium. Sure, you can make about 40 city-sized Fat Man bombs out of it, but the scale is kind of pointless now: with a little hydrogen, you can turn a 14kg bomb up to eleven, and get yields that could blow up half of Japan instead of one small city.
So, Japan can make 40 bombs. If Japan had only 20kg of plutonium, it could still make 3 or 4 devastating small warheads with fusion-boosted-fission, enough to blow holes in Russia or devastate the United States.
If you think that's unrealistic, take a crash course in nuclear weapons. Fat Man had 14,000 grams of plutonium; it converted less that 1 gram into energy before the plutonium core blew apart. A fission-boosted-fusion bomb uses that explosion to trigger nuclear fusion in a second stage, which provides compressive force to hold the core together: the plutonium ball that burns a gram and blows apart now gets crushed together. With the right structure, you can burn 100 grams of the fuel, making the bomb 100 times bigger. A 1kg bomb would still be 7 times bigger than the 14kg Fat Man bomb.
Some serious upgrades have been made to nuclear weapons. They're largely conventional explosive, with a little nuclear core; some are boosted with fusion, which sometimes has startling effects--once, they had a blast go off 100 times bigger than the models projected.
Nuclear weapons are devastating. A handful of nuclear fuel is an arsenal. When you start getting into truckloads of fissile material, you're just wasting effort.
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