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Russia’s Ukraine invasion forces Japan to confront its nuclear taboo – but while Abe’s keen on a US umbrella, Japanese public is ‘simply not ready’
- The former prime minister wants Tokyo to talk to the US about a nuclear-sharing agreement, though polls suggest most Japanese are opposed to the idea
- Moscow’s actions are prompting a re-evaluation in a nation increasingly conscious about the nuclear leaps being made by its neighbours China and North Korea
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The spectre of nuclear weapons being deployed in Ukraine, combined with the leaps that both China and North Korea have made in recent years in atomic weaponry, has emboldened some on the right in Japan to call for the nation’s non-nuclear principles to be reconsidered.
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And while the possibility of a conventional conflict devolving into an exchange of nuclear warheads has risen, analysts say the people of Japan – the only nation to have been the target of atomic attacks – are not yet ready to embrace their own nuclear deterrent.
The question of Japan developing and deploying its own nuclear weapons has long been an undercurrent in the nation’s security discussions, but came to the fore this week when former prime minister Shinzo Abe proposed that Tokyo open discussions with the United States on a nuclear-sharing agreement, similar to the way in which non-nuclear members of Nato are able to rely on the organisation’s nuclear-capable states.
Speaking on television on Sunday, Abe said, “It is necessary to understand how the world’s security is maintained. We should not put a taboo on discussions about the reality that we face.”
Those hawkish views were met with immediate resistance from the present prime minister, with Fumio Kishida telling a session of the Japanese parliament, the Diet, the very next day that it would be “unacceptable” for Japan to pursue an arrangement to share nuclear weapons.
Kishida represents a constituency in Hiroshima, where survivors of the first nuclear attack in history have condemned Abe’s comments.
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