Japan Lets U.S. Assume Control of a Nuclear Cache
By Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger, NY Times, March 24, 2014
THE HAGUE--Japan announced on Monday that it would turn over to Washington a large cache of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium, a decades-old research stockpile that is large enough to build dozens of nuclear weapons, according to American and Japanese officials.
The move is the biggest single success in President Obama’s five-year push to secure the world’s most dangerous materials, and comes as world leaders gathered here on Monday for a summit meeting on nuclear security. Since Mr. Obama began the series of meetings with world leaders--this will be the third--13 nations have eliminated their caches of nuclear materials and scores more have hardened security at their storage facilities to prevent theft by potential terrorists.
In a joint statement by the United States and Japan, the two countries said that Japan had agreed to “remove and dispose” of hundreds of kilograms of nuclear material from the Fast Critical Assembly at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency.
The statement said the elimination of the uranium and plutonium would “help prevent unauthorized actors, criminals, or terrorists from acquiring such materials. This material, once securely transported to the United States, will be sent to a secure facility and fully converted into less sensitive forms.”
The statement did not specify the amount of the material to be eliminated. American and Japanese officials said it would include 700 pounds, or 320 kilograms, of weapons-grade plutonium. The amount of highly enriched uranium has not been announced but is estimated at 450 pounds.
The Japanese agreement to transfer the material has both practical and political significance. For years these stores of weapons-grade material were not a secret, but they were lightly guarded at best; a reporter for The New York Times who visited the main storage site at Tokaimura in the early 1990s found unarmed guards and a site less-well protected than many banks. While security has improved, the stores have long been considered vulnerable.
Iran has cited Japan’s large stockpiles of bomb-ready material as evidence of a double standard about which nations can be trusted. And last month China began publicly denouncing Japan’s supply, in an apparent warning that a rightward, nationalistic turn in Japanese politics could result in the country seeking its own weapons.
At various moments right-wing politicians in Japan have referred to the stockpile as a deterrent, suggesting that it was useful to have material so that the world knows Japan, with its advanced technological acumen, could easily fashion it into weapons.
The nuclear fuel being turned over to the United States, which is of American and British origin, is a small fraction of Japan’s overall stockpile. Japan has more than nine tons of plutonium stored in various locations and it is scheduled to open in the fall a new nuclear fuel plant that could produce many tons more every year. American officials have been quietly pressing Japan to abandon the program, arguing that the material is insufficiently protected even though much of it is in a form that would be significantly more difficult to use in a weapon than the supplies being sent to the United States.
Mr. Obama’s initiative to lock down plutonium and uranium around the world was supposed to have been just the first step in an ambitious agenda to seek “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” as he said in Prague in 2009. Now, the downturn in relations with Russia has dashed hopes of mutual reductions in the world’s two largest arsenals. At the same time, North Korea has resumed its program, Pakistan and India are modernizing their weapons, and the United States Senate has not taken up any of the treaties Mr. Obama once described as vital.
In fact, Russia is now modernizing its nuclear force. So is the United States: To pass the New Start treaty in 2010, the administration told Congress it would spend at least $80 billion on a “life extension” program for its existing nuclear arsenal, and that it would cost far more to upgrade nuclear submarines in years ahead.
