LOL, if anyone thinks Japan has not gone nuclear, they don’t understand the Japanese mindest very well. Oh, I am sure that Japan doesn’t have any actual nuclear weapons on hand... but I am sure they have stockpiled all the components, carefully kept separate, and have run all the supercomputer simulations they need to make sure that, if they ever needed to be snapped together, they would definitely work.
Delivery systems? Japan’s Epsilon rocket is ICBM in everything but name — logically so because it is basically a demilitarized version of the MX Peacekeeper missile — built in the same tech, anyhow.
The author here cites Ukraine, but I think Afghanistan is more unpleasant from the Japanese standpoint. The way Biden unassed the country, leaving billions in hardware and thousands of US citizens in the lurch must have been a total leemer to Tokyo defense planners.
Ever since Obama, the Japanese have been wrapping their minds around the idea that the US is not a credible defense partner anymore and have been quietly preparing for the time when they would have to go it alone. All Afghanistan and Ukraine are doing is making it clear that they will need to be ready sooner rather than later.
Very well said. Thank you.
The last several decades of loss of life and treasure in the neocon-neolib pursuit of leading and enforcing a world order is coming undone, as those commenting here sometimes thrown Putin-ist and Biden-ist pejoratives as if grenades. What may be known is that the EU has played the US as a patsy for decades, and NATO and the EU have both pursued expansionist goals as if immune from market forces. Withdraw a secured energy supply and we see the quick result. Ditto for the last year and a half which took a newly energy-independent US and made it a net importer of energy again.
Seems to me that the poles are not between nations as power blocs these days, but between governments and their hoped-for generations of serfs in the Hayekian sense, working to pay "perpetual debt." Certainly this is the message from the UN as from the WEF.
As individuals, we live in cooperative communities, it is true, but we also are each our own separate "pole" such that a multi-polar world should not hold the catastrophic vision some hold for it. A uni-polar world, on the other hand, can only be ruled, as in the dream of aristocratic and Marxist dictatorships.
That a Japan might plan for its own survival is what Japan should do. And every nation of the world as well. Is the US a "credible" defense partner? Certainly given the invasions and bombings and color revolutions in which the US has participated in the last several decades suggests we are a credible OFFENCE partner.
Given the likes of the J6 committee's offense of late, as one example among many, other nations would do well to consider such.
The one leader with the brains to do this was Shinzo Abe, whose tatemae was to be every nation's friend, and whose honne was to put Japan first in everything.
He was also be smart enough to know that Trump was the one American leader he could work with, and that this made Trump an enemy of the global state.
If I had any inkling that Japan wanted to return to its colonialist/imperialist past, all this would scare me, but I am convinced that is not in their future: for them it's Japan first, but not Japan uber alles.
Ever since Obama, the Japanese have been wrapping their minds around the idea that the US is not a credible defense partner anymore and have been quietly preparing for the time when they would have to go it alone.
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I worked on a naval facility in Japan for 2 years every day full time and was all over Japan during that timeframe. I traveled to Yokosuka, Itazuke, Sasebo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Osaka, and many other places. I worked with the Japanese all day every day. They entertained me and my wife in their homes. I daily observed the billions of dollars in facilities, equipment, ships and personnel that the US has committed to Japan for 77 years.
So, respectfully, I disagree with your statement highlighted above. The Japanese know the U.S. produces an idiot for President occasionally (Carter, Clinton, Obama and now Biden) and they just shift gears and ride it out. They do not and will not discontinue their militarily based dependency on the U.S. As my friend Yugi Kugita used tell me, almost daily, “Japanese love America”!!
—”but I am sure they have stockpiled all the components, carefully kept separate, and have run all the supercomputer simulations they need to make sure that, if they ever needed to be snapped together, they would definitely work.”
Far more technology is required to produce a Toyota than a basic nuclear bomb.
Has Japan started its new nuclear fuel reprocessing plant last promised for this year? Plutonium by the ton.