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Japan, a country which officially has no dealings with nuclear weapons,
is emerging as a threat to worldwide disarmament, according to speakers
at a conference near Tokyo this week.

No one accuses the Japanese authorities of building atom bombs. But
concern is mounting that the country’s move towards a ‘plutonium economy’
may have consequences almost as upsetting to international plans to reduce
nuclear arsenals.

The plutonium programme begins in earnest next year when a cargo ship
with an armed escort will dock at Cherbourg in France to load flasks containing
1 tonne of plutonium extracted from Japanese reactor fuel that was reprocessed
at Cap la Hague, Normandy. The ship will cross the Atlantic and pass through
the Panama Canal to the Pacific and on to Japan. It will be the first of
regular voyages, from Barrow-in-Furness in Britain as well as Cherbourg,
which will ferry 45 tonnes of plutonium halfway across the world by the
end of the decade.

Meanwhile, Japan’s own reprocessing plant, at Rokkasho on the northern
tip of the island of Honshu, is due to start extracting plutonium in 1997.
By 2010, the country’s stockpile will have risen to 100 tonnes, said Jinzaburo
Takagi, a chemist who left Japan’s nuclear industry to set up the country’s
most active opposition organisation, the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Centre.
‘Japan will become the number one plutonium country,’ Takagi told the conference,
organised by his group and Greenpeace.

The Japanese authorities say this plutonium will reduce the country’s
dependence on imported uranium. ‘Japan has no intention to stockpile plutonium,’
said Kazuhisa Mori, head of the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, which represents
the nuclear industry. The government is developing ways to blend plutonium
with uranium to fuel conventional thermal reactors. The first shipments
from Europe will go into a prototype fast-breeder reactor which is due to
go on stream in late 1992.

‘It seems that Japan is going the way of other countries, only it is
slower to see the light, that the breeder is uneconomic and has poor performance,’
said Thomas Cochran, of the Natural Resources Defense Council in the US.
‘If wasting money was the only problem, few people outside Japan would show
interest. But the development of the plutonium breeder reactor involves
great risk to society.’

One worry is that the plutonium might meet with an accident on the way
to Japan, or be hijacked by terrorists or a rogue state. Damon Moglen, a
campaigner for Greenpeace, told the conference that an accident to a ship
containing plutonium ‘could lead to environmental and health risks beyond
those of even the worst nuclear accidents so far’.

However, the most intriguing question is whether Tokyo is secretly preparing
to become a nuclear superpower, as a safeguard against future nuclear tensions.
Takagi said that the Japanese self-defence forces (armed forces) ‘want to
get closer and closer to where the plutonium is . . . I don’t know whether
there is a secret nuclear weapons plan, but I think that the SDF wishes
to have a nuclear capability’.

Paul Leventhal, director of the Nuclear Control Institute, a private
organisation in Washington DC, said that even if Japan does not intend to
build bombs, its policy will encourage nuclear proliferation: with a surplus
of plutonium and an advanced missile capability, Japan could make nuclear
weapons in no time, he said. While such a decision would be purely a matter
for Japan, it might encourage an arms race involving neighbouring Korea
and Taiwan.