nuclear-news

Secret Cold War Nuclear Policies – USA and Japan

Declassified U.S. government documents make a mockery of the Three Non-Nuclear Principles. The papers reveal that Japanese government officials ignored evidence that the United States was routinely bringing nuclear weapons into Japanese ports.

United States Circumvented Laws To Help Japan Accumulate Tons of Plutonium, DC Burea By Joseph Trento,  April 9th, 2012  “…..  In October 1964, communist China stunned the world by detonating its first nuclear bomb. The world was caught by surprise, but nowhere were emotions as strong as in Japan. Three months later Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato went to Washington for secret talks with President Lyndon Johnson. Sato gave LBJ an extraordinary ultimatum: if the United States did not guarantee Japan’s security against nuclear attack, Japan would develop a nuclear arsenal. The ultimatum forced LBJ to extend the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” over Japan. Ironically, this guarantee later enabled Sato to establish Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles: to never own or produce nuclear weapons or allow them on Japanese territory. The policy won Sato the Nobel Prize for Peace. The Japanese public and the rest of the world never knew that these three principles were never fully enforced, and Sato allowed the secret nuclear weapons program to go on.

In the years to come, thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons would pass through Japanese ports and American bases in Japan. Even before Sato’s historic meeting with LBJ, Japan had quietly agreed to officially ignore U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Japan. Japanese officials were shrewd enough to put nothing down on paper, but U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo Edwin O. Reischauer disclosed the pact in a 1981 newspaper interview. In 1960, the Japanese government had verbally agreed to allow nuclear-armed American warships access to Japanese ports and territorial waters. Several current and former U.S. and Japanese officials confirm Ambassador Reischauer’s interpretation, including the former Japanese Ambassador in Washington, Takezo Shimoda.

When asked about these issues in the 1980s, the Japanese government flatly denied there was any such understanding and said it was “inconceivable” that it had a different interpretation of the treaty conditions than the United States. Nonetheless, after Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki ordered his Foreign Ministry to investigate the facts, the best it could do was to say it could find no written records of the pact.

Declassified U.S. government documents make a mockery of the Three Non-Nuclear Principles. The papers reveal that Japanese government officials ignored evidence that the United States was routinely bringing nuclear weapons into Japanese ports. American military planners took Japan’s silence as tacit permission to carry nuclear weapons into Japanese harbors. The American aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, home ported for decades in Yokohama, routinely carried a small arsenal of nuclear weapons…….  http://www.dcbureau.org/201204097128/national-security-news-service/united-states-circumvented-laws-to-help-japan-accumulate-tons-of-plutonium.html

August 11, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA