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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).
I'd be worried too if a country who had invaded mine in living history, was under-reporting plutonium.
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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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It's pretty widely believed that Japan essentially *has* nuclear weapons. But by not completing the final assembly of the warheads, they don't violate the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Estimates on how much time it would take to assemble the warheads should they decide to violate that treaty range from hours to months.
The Chinese government still uses Japan and the atrocities committed in the 1930s and 1940s as a bogeyman to distract from the atrocities committed by the Chinese government against it's own people in the 1940s and 1950s.
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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.
Actually deaths from conventional firebombings were of similar in magnitude of lives lost and destruction.
And (like coal), burning things produces a lot of long term pollutants that raise the cancer and early mortality rate. It is more what you are "used" to. Coal actually kills 167.5 people per terrawatt each and every year than nuclear. Coal deaths number in the thousands and when coal seams get set on fire- the area can be uninhabitable for decades (like nuclear) and be polluted for centuries with mercury and dioxins (very similar to radiation). Fukishima made 780 square kilometers uninhabitable. The Jhaqira coal fire has made 700 square kilometers uninhabitable. And the smoke affects 400,000 people continuously day in day out.
Conventional bombs from world war I are polluting water in france and belgium and killed two belgium workers in march.
We have some weird reaction to nuclear because we are not used to it. Conventional mines have left some areas uninhabitable and are still killing and maiming people decades later.
The after effects of acoustic shock from "ordinary" bombing can linger until a persons premature death years later.
I agree nukes are terrible. But I think your "comfort" and familiarity with conventional weapons leads you to overestimate their long and short term safety.
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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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Oh come on. The Japan of 2014 is not the Japan of 1945. Virtually everyone from that generation is dead or beyond any political influence. I have some issues with Japan over its acceptance of some its activities during its empire days, but all in all, it has been a well behaved member of the international community and one of the West's most important Asian allies. I doubt it even wants to have nuclear weapons, but considering the way China has been behaving of late, any prudent Japanese government is going to want to make it clear that it's lack of nuclear deterrent is due to the decision not to have one, and not because of any technical difficulties.
China cannot continue to poke its neighbors with sticks and not expect that those neighbors will not begin to ponder just how much longer they're going to be poked. Japan is a major industrial power, one of the wealthiest and most advanced nations on the planet, and if China doesn't want to feel threatened by Japan, then it needs to stop pushing buttons itself.
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Japan was not "tapped out". It's well documented that their backs were against the wall and they were prepared to throw the bodies of every last fighting man, woman and child into the expected land invasion by the allies, and it would have been a horrific bloody mess. So many casualties were anticipated from the planned allied invasion that the US started pumping out Purple Heart medals in advance of the action and so many were manufactured that those same medals are still being awarded today.
Hell, even AFTER the nukes were dropped some of the more rabid Japanese commanders still wanted to continue the fight and nearly mutinied. If the bombs hadn't been dropped to show overwhelming tactical advantage, their collective spirit wouldn't have broken, and the deaths, casualties and mass suicides during the Okinawa invasion would have been repeated on a far larger scale.
Japan was already suing for peace.
No, Imperial Japan was not suing for peace. A few diplomats were quietly floating the idea with Russia and living in complete fear that they would be discovered by the military and summarily executed for doing so. Even when the Emperor had decided to surrender and recorded a surrender message for the country elements of the military attacked the Imperial Palace to capture and destroy that recording and to "rescue" the emperor from the politicians who were leading him "astray".
"as many as one thousand officers raided the Imperial palace on the evening of August 14, to destroy the recording. The rebels were confused by the layout of the Imperial palace and were unable to find the recording, which had been hidden in a pile of documents. The recording was successfully smuggled out of the palace in a laundry basket of women's underwear and broadcast the following day, although another attempt was made to stop it from being played at the radio station."
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The majority of the Imperial Japanese leadership would only consider an armistice, a peace treaty, like that of WW1 (1919) that would leave Imperial Japanese leadership intact and the home islands unoccupied.
They had run out of bombs, and the kamikaze were coming because they had no fuel to get back to Japan; die in the ocean, or die smashing your plane into a military target.
No. Weapons and ammunition had been stockpiled. This included kamikaze aircraft and boats. Also Kamikazes took off with the full knowledge of and the intent to crash their aircraft into their target.
The arguments around this drift over time. A lot of veterans have started telling me Japan was ready to drop plague-infested fleas on America. They'd hit California, and it would wipe out the entire nation. They've already tested them on China, and it worked. ... except China wasn't wiped out, and Japan could never reach California.
The test in China was a limited test. They bombed a couple of villages and sent doctors in to examine the results. The tests included the use of a ceramic bomb casing that fractured and dispersed fleas using a very small charge that allowed most of the fleas to survive. Imperial Japan had successfully, although ineffectively, attacked the US pacific coast with balloons that drifted across the Pacific and dropped incendiary bombs. However the real plan regarding the fleas was to use submarine based aircraft. Yes, submarine based. Imperial Japan developed and built several submarines with a waterproof compartment on top that could house two or three aircraft. They were technological marvels that the US captured, studied, and sunk to avoid having to share them with the Russians.
The whole story paints a narrative where varied analysis tells you that either it's made-up completely, or Japan has a weapon that kills as many people as a conventional drop-bomb.
"This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread bubonic plague.[28] Some of these bombs were designed with ceramic (porcelain) shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938. These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and other deadly pathogens." ...The I-400-class was designed with the range to travel anywhere in the world and return"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... "They were submarine aircraft carriers able to carry three Aichi M6A Seiran aircraft underwater to their destinations
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The truth is
You do realize that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are currently inhabited, don't you? In fact, they were inhabited shortly after the bombs there exploded.
Nuclear weapons are not designed to render areas uninhabitable. They're designed to make a gigantic explosion, and that's it. Making the area uninhabitable, sorta like the Romans did with Carthage, is not one of the design goals.
The China of 2014 is moving as quickly as it can towards becoming a major military power, and let us not forget that China is a nuclear power, so the idea that even if Japan went all the way, amended its constitution and formed a fully fleshed armed forces with nuclear capability (and everyone already believes that Japan is already nuclear capable), that it would mean the imminent invasion of China.
China does not fear invasion, or anything like it. What it fears is that its own imperial ambitions will be completely constrained.
The militaristic Japan of the last century is a useful propaganda bogeyman for China, but as a real threat to anything but contested maritime boundaries, it doesn't exist.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.