Lee Byong-Chul: Japan's Nuclear Ambitions Awaken

Lee Byong-Chul is a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul.

It would be wrong to say Japan’s experience as the first victim of nuclear weapons in 1945, the year when the United States became the world’s first nuclear power, is a permanent deterrent to its own ambitions for nuclear weapons. It would be also a mistake to assume that the country’s nuclear trauma in the 67-year wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially since the 2011 Fukushima era, has snuffed the government’s interest in weaponization.

It is thus disappointing but not surprising that Japan recently altered its basic law on atomic energy to include “national security” among its goals for nuclear power. An Upper House session was quick to revise the main principles of the basic law on nuclear power for the first time in 34 years so as to avoid the neighbors’ watchful gaze. That adds fuel to the fire that the new wording could be a stepping stone to legally permitting the development of atomic weapons in the not-to-distant future. It is hardly the first time that Japan has fumbled the nuclear issue with its neighbors, although Japanese officials in the past have always immediately moved to squash such allegations....