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April 2002: WEAPONS POTENTIAL OF JAPAN'S COMMERCIAL NUCLEAR PROGRAM
CONFIRMED
Tokyo - Yesterday
senior Japanese politician Ichiro Ozawa announced that Japan could use its
commercial plutonium stockpile to nuclear weapons.
Ozawa confirmation the threat posed by the country's massive plutonium program. Leader of the opposition party Jiyuto (Liberal Party), Ozawa declared that if the military threat posed by China continued to grow, "It would be so easy for us to produce nuclear warheads - we have plutonium at nuclear power plants in Japan, enough to make several thousand such warheads."(1)
Japan now has sufficient plutonium already for more than 7000 nuclear warheads, a potential only expected to grow. Japan has a stockpile of over 38,000 kilograms of plutonium, of which more than 5,000kg is stored at various sites around the country. The largest stock of its plutonium (around 31,000kg) is currently stored in France and the UK. This is to be shipped back over the next 10 to 15 years.
In total Japan is expected to have more than 45,000kg of plutonium by around 2006-10. However, a new plutonium reprocessing plant now under construction at Rokkasho-mura in northern Japan is scheduled to produce as much as 100,000kg plutonium during the first fifteen years of operation. In total Japan would have more plutonium than is contained in all United States nuclear warheads. It takes as little as 5kg of this plutonium to make one nuclear weapon.
Greenpeace campaigner Shaun Burnie said of Ozawa and the reprocessing program, " He has exposed the myths of it being a peaceful energy program for a resource poor country. Under this international cover the country has acquired massive stocks of plutonium serving the purpose of an undeclared nuclear weapons program."
Ozawa's statement may awaken the international community to the scale of Japan's plutonium program and the threat of confrontation in Northeast Asia. "The challenge is to ensure that the threat he declares is never carried out," said Burnie.
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Notes to editors:
1. Ozawa's statement was made during a lecture given in the southern City of Fukuoka.