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Six Decades of US-Japanese Government Collusion in Bringing Nuclear Weapons to Japan.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
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The Navy ship containing nuclear bombs that a junior officer saw anchored off Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Station in 1959 was only the most notorious of many U.S. violations of Japan's official policy banning nuclear weapons. The Japanese government has a long history of secretly agreeing to their deployments, and feigning ignorance when they were revealed. The outrage that erupted in the press and in the Diet when former American Ambassador to Japan, Edwin Reischauer, spoke publicly in 1981 about nuclear-armed warships in Japan's ports came close to bringing down an LDP government. In Okinawa local residents protested the large numbers and types of nuclear weapons based there during the U.S. military occupation (1945-72). Breaking its promise that they be permanently removed, the Japanese government concluded a secret nuclear understanding as part of the 1969 Okinawa Reversion Agreement that the U.S. government could bring them back whenever it decided there was “a great emergency.” In 2009 a high Japanese government official advocated their return to Okinawa in testimony before a U.S. Congressional Commission.
Keywords
MCAS IwakuniLSTAtomic Energy Basic LawThree Non-Nuclear PrinciplesBravo H-Bomb TestLucky Dragon No. 5Ambassador Edwin ReischauerHonest John rocketU.S.S. TiconderogaKadena AirbaseOkinawa Reversion AgreementPrime Minister Satō EisakuPresident Richard Nixonsecret nuclear understandingHenoko Ordnance Storage DepotAkiba Takeo
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Authors 2021
References
Notes
1 Geoffrey Murray, “Japan reels under Reischauer's nuclear ‘bombshell’,” Christian Science Monitor, May 19, 1981.
2 Ellsberg, Doomsday Machine, 118.
3 From email communication with Daniel Ellsberg in May, 2021.
4 Okuaki Satoru, “How Japanese scientists confronted the U.S. and Japanese governments to reveal the effects of Bikini H-bomb tests,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, September 1, 2019, Volume 27, Issue 17, Number 2. From the introduction by Steve Rabson.
5 Okuaki.
6 Hans Kristensen, “Japan under the US nuclear umbrella, supporting documents global problem-solving nuke policy,” Nautilus Institute, July 21, 1999.
7 Kristensen, “Nuclear umbrella.”
8 Kristensen, “Nuclear umbrella.”
9 Okinawa Beigun kichi (U.S. bases in Okinawa), Shin-Nihon Shppan-sha, 1972. Includes Henoko ammunition storage area map.
10 Translated in Steve Rabson, Righteous Cause or Tragic Folly: Changing Views of War in Modern Japanese Poetry, Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998, 227. Also see Michael S. Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory, Routledge, 1999, 93-102.
11 Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, William Burr, “Where they were,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, November 1, 1999.
12 Ota Masakatsu and Steve Rabson, “U.S. veterans reveal 1962 nuclear close call dodged in Okinawa,” Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 13, Issue 13, Number 3, March 30, 2015.
13 Kristensen, “Nuclear umbrella.”
14 Quoted in Kristensen.
15 Kristensen, “Nuclear Umbrella.”
16 Kristensen, “Nuclear Umbrella.”
17 Gregory Kulacki with a comment by Steve Rabson, “Nuclear hawks in Tokyo call for stronger nuclear posture in Japan and Okinawa,” Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 16, Issue 11, Number 1, June 1, 2018.
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