The Motorcycle Diaries: Japan’s Nuclear Program

Aaron Stein 0:10

Hello and welcome to the Arms Control Wonk podcast. My name is Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog, an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, as well as a PhD candidate at King's College.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:22

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I'm the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk and the director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies. And I'm back from France. I was on vacation tasting wine in Bordeaux.

Aaron 0:36

You were on vacation, too. You were in Lyon. I was in Lyon with my mother two weeks ago, and last weekend I was in Bagno Vignone, a wonderful little town in Tuscany, close to Montalcino, where I was also tasting wine. You know, we have to be careful.

Jeffrey 0:49

We're going to give people the impression that the life of an arms control wonk is glamorous, which it's really not.

Aaron 0:54

No, not really.

Jeffrey 0:56

We're not here to talk about France. We're here to talk about Japan. Japan's been in the news lately. The Abe government has announced that it's going to reinterpret the Japanese constitution to permit collective self-defense. The notion of collective being that the Japanese government wants to be able to use force not merely to defend itself, but also to defend allies.

But interestingly, the Abe government has decided not to seek a constitutional amendment. They're simply going to reinterpret the constitution. And that's generated a fair amount of opposition in Japan. As it turns out, simply reinterpreting the constitution doesn't change much. The government has to actually go through the Japanese diet to rewrite the laws. And given the concern that's been expressed, it looks like this process is going to take a long time, maybe an order of a year or two.

And it's a timely question, since by total coincidence, I had just completed a column for foreign policy arguing that I don't think Japan will build nuclear weapons. And although the two topics are slightly different, I think that in some way they're the same, in the sense that in the debate both about reinterpreting the Constitution and And the debate about whether Japan might build nuclear weapons, I think we worry way too much about the threat of Japanese militarism, and as a consequence, kind of miss what's really interesting and unique about Japanese foreign policy.

I don't know, Aaron, I asked you to read the column. Were you persuaded?

Aaron 2:31

No, I mean, you're persuaded because I see a lot of parallels to other countries where there's security arrangements with the United States. But just starting with Japan here, I find the I guess I find the recent changes to Japanese foreign policy to be indicative of what's going on more broadly in the world. I mean, I see a lot of changes to have the capability to act more independent of the U.S. as something you see in the Gulf, something you see in Turkey, as well as in other places in Europe.

So I'm curious if that's what you mean by the fact that maybe we're missing the trees for the forest, if that's how it goes. By focusing so much on the threat of proliferation, we're missing some of the dynamics that are underpinning This move in allied countries to carve out more independence from the U.S. and what that really means for the future of the security relationship with our allies.

Jeffrey 3:23

Well, I guess I would say it a little differently, because although I think there are strands of independence, what really strikes me as interesting about Japan, and I think this is true for a lot of US allies, really, and I think it's why I don't think the Japanese would build nuclear weapons, and it's one of the reasons I'm not quite as worried as a policy matter about collective self-defense in Japan.

Is that when I look at the Japanese situation, I don't see a country that has distinct foreign policy choices in front of it. Sometimes when people are armchair strategists, they imagine like, oh, well, Japan could rearm itself with nuclear weapons, or it could become an unarmed neutral state like Switzerland. Whenever I've talked to Japanese colleagues, what I take away is a fundamental and defining fact about Japan's foreign policy is that neither of those things are options.

And you see some of that in how hard it is for the Abe cabinet to... To pursue this notion of collective self-defense, which you know, whatever one's questions about his motives or his means are, is really quite a limited a limited change. I mean, the notion is if US and Japanese you know, ships are at sea can a Japanese ship intercept a North Korean missile that's aimed at you know the United States instead of Japan.

I mean, that's a, it's a pretty limited But even that generates an enormous amount of controversy in Japan, which I think gets to this notion that actually there's no mainstream constituency in Japan for any foreign policy other than alliance with the United States. And if that's true... If you think about it, that's a really strange spot for Japanese policymakers to be in because they have essentially no control over how much security their country has at any given moment.

A colleague of mine compared it to riding on the back of a motorcycle. You can see the twists and the turns and the bumps in the road, but you can't do anything about it. And so I think an enormous amount of the anxiety that we hear from Japanese policymakers is about that. And it's not easily remedied by becoming independent.

That would actually probably make that anxiety worse.

Aaron 5:42

No, exactly. Exactly. I heard you speaking there and I read the column and I instantly think about what's going on in Turkish foreign policy and been going on for a while about this. It's that your fundamental defense strategy rests upon alliance entanglement, as I call it, or it rests on the idea that the U.S. has your back.

So that creates a certain sense of anxiety that you can't reach over, I guess in this case across the Pacific, and fundamentally change The debates taking place within the United States about the direction of our foreign policy outside of maybe kicking and screaming in the international press. So I'm curious if maybe, if this is a tactic in Japan, I actually don't know the answer to this.

Does this nuclear weapons stuff come up more at a time when it's perceived that the U S isn't taking Japan as seriously as they think they should be?

Jeffrey 6:36

So, yeah, I think it, And I go into this in the column a little bit. I try to talk about the people who raise the issue and why they might raise the issue. And what I think is interesting is it's not the case that I'll say it this way. When people talk about Japan building nuclear weapons, they kind of act like Japan has a certain level of security.

And if that level goes down, then they'll build some nuclear weapons in order to go back up, right? Like it's like a thermostat. Oh, five more nuclear weapons and we can go back. But that's, That's not really a choice for Japan, because it's not like it's one person who's turning a thermostat up and down. It's a question about overall foreign policy orientation.

And so you wouldn't need a different decision. You'd actually need different people running the government, radically different people. And so whenever I see claims about nuclear weapons being floated in Japan, it's usually people who are somewhat extremists Don't want just nuclear weapons. They want a radically different foreign policy orientation for the country. And so the reason that I don't think the Japanese will build nuclear weapons is because I don't think that will happen absent some total and fundamental change in the Japanese political system to the point where they're electing radically different people with radically different views.

Aaron 8:07

And so, yeah, go ahead. No, I mean, I'm just curious because this is what This is the Jacques Hyman's argument. I mean, whatever you may think about his approach to nuclear proliferation, he argues that leaders who have a national identity conception that are fundamentally at odds with the key comparison other are more likely to proliferate than others.

I've found in my own research is that there are a lot of those guys who actually exist, but they just lack the capability or the access to power to really alter the direction of a country's foreign policy. So while there may be a lot of them, they aren't in the places that really count. Thereby, they aren't very mainstream in terms of politics.

I see this in the Japanese case, and what I was able to pull from your column, but I see there being a threshold. A country may not go nuclear, but it could decide to operate underneath the nuclear sphere, which is what we've been talking about over and over again on podcasts, which is really something that I find most fascinating, is the growing capabilities of conventional weapons, particularly for developed states like Japan, that can replicate some of the nuclear missions.

And the inability to come up with effective strategies to... I guess, if you think about the nuclear deterrence, the rungs of escalation, to really figure out how exactly we're going to deal with conventional weapons That can be used in a conflict perhaps more easily than say, absolutely more easily I should say, than crossing the nuclear threshold. You understand what I'm getting at?

Jeffrey 9:45

I do, but I think there are two pieces there. One piece is who are the people who advocate for nuclear weapons and why do they do that? I try to illustrate this story or this idea in the piece with two contrasting stories. That are from the late 1960s, early 1970s, but involve people who are either still involved in Japanese politics or are the children or grandchildren of these people.

So it's not ancient history. And the two stories are, there was a Japanese guy named Yukio Mishima. That was actually his pen name. And he was a famous Japanese writer who became obsessed with a whole bunch of weird things like bodybuilding and Extreme militarism. And he had a militia, and that militia had kind of a relationship with the Japanese military, and so he went to the Japanese army headquarters for a meeting And he and his colleagues sort of tied up the general, demanded all the troops at the headquarters be mustered.

And then he gives this speech, again, in 1970, calling for the troops to depose the democratically elected government, restore the emperor to actual control, and, you know, There was no coup. The troops just kind of laughed at it. So then he retired to the office and tried to commit ritual suicide. He actually succeeded, sort of, but they made a botched job of it.

And I think that story is so interesting because that got enormous headlines. And that's evidence of this small but nonetheless still existing extreme right-wing sentiment in Japan. But I contrast that with, at the same time, Just a few months before, the United States and Japan had negotiated the return of Okinawa. The United States had Okinawa in its possession after World War II, and in 1969, the Japanese government wanted it back.

And the prime minister at the time, a guy named Sato, who's actually Abe's great uncle, right? Political families in Japan. He insisted through negotiations, and this was the major sticking point, that the United States return Okinawa to Japan with no nuclear weapons. So on the one hand, you've got this kind of extreme voice Which gets all the headlines.

But the reality of the policy is that Sato felt super constrained and couldn't accept an Okinawa with nuclear weapons. And so ultimately, the United States and Japan signed this secret agreement, which actually surfaces in 2010 when the DPJ, the Democratic Party of Japan, comes to power. It's incredibly controversial. Again, it's not ancient history. It's something that still has real power to shock and upset in Japan.

You know, it seems to me that there is this notion of misplaced emphasis, that we talk about Japanese nuclear weapons and we talk about Japanese militarism. And what's really going on is you've got a state that's in a pretty difficult security environment that's very dependent on the United States and has really no options. And so I think that sort of drives a lot of the behavior you see.

In terms of, you know, the stuff happening under the The nuclear umbrella. Sorry, you asked two questions and two long answers. I think that's the seatbelt conversation or the ski helmet conversation we had a couple of weeks ago, which is this notion that Yeah, there's all kinds of interesting conventional fighting that can happen beneath deterrence and extended deterrence.

And that stuff really, you know, yeah, there's a huge emphasis, I think, particularly among US allies on precision conventional capabilities to sort of deal with Nuclear programs, well, to deal with conventional aggression enabled by bad guy nuclear programs.

Aaron 14:03

This is a reflection of our own policy, by the way. This is them copying the doctrine that we put in place, particularly starting in the first Gulf War.

Jeffrey 14:13

Well, right. And it's this common theme of frustration and escape, right? If the North Koreans have nuclear weapons and they feel like they can then turn around and do stuff like sink ships or just generally behave badly... What do you do? It's easy to say, oh, we should have nuclear weapons too, but that doesn't solve the problem.

Both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and Pakistan feels no compunction about reaching out and hitting the Indians whenever it feels like it. And so if nuclear weapons don't offer you an escape, then I think some people think, well, maybe conventional strike capabilities will allow one to respond and so on.

Aaron 14:51

Actually, there are huge stability concerns there. One thing I liked about your piece is that you said the Japanese wouldn't just pachki together a simple device. So this idea that they're a screw turn away from the bomb is – We don't know where the origins of that statement come from, but best you can tell it comes from the 1970s and was repeated in a book in 1991, if I'm remembering the piece correctly.

Jeffrey 15:17

Yeah, that's exactly right. So there was this Japan is six months away from a bomb thing, and I tried to track down the origin of that statement. And I don't want to say who repeated it first, because that would sound like a criticism of that person. And actually, if you actually read the original... Explanation. Six months is like the biblical 40.

It's a number that's supposed to mean quickly in the same way that 40 days and 40 nights meant a long time. And there was nothing objectionable about the way that it was originally conveyed, the idea that Japan could relatively quickly build nuclear weapons, other than the fact that the number is wrong. Right. It would be like a couple of years and pretty expensive.

And it's kind of caught on to imply that the Japanese have a deterrent. When, in fact, what's really interesting, again, about their foreign policy is that they don't. They don't have a deterrent. They're really dependent on the United States. And as a consequence of that, I think we misinterpret or misunderstand Japan.

Aaron 16:22

You know, what's really, what's really happening.

Jeffrey 16:25

But then again, I mean, that's probably not just true in Japan, right? I mean, I, I find, and this is sort of touches on your expertise that generally We do a bad job of understanding the domestic drivers of our allies' behavior, whether they are in Northeast Asia or the Middle East or Europe. And we tend to assume that we play a much bigger role, I think, than their own security environment and domestic politics do.

Aaron 16:53

Yes, and I'll take it one step further. I'll address what you're saying in a second, the Middle Eastern conflicts, is that when there's disgruntled When our allies are disgruntled, perhaps about the way the US is handling tangential security issues that they feel affect them, their one outlet is to repeat the criticisms of US policymakers about other US policymakers.

So you see an echo chamber coming about that are based on US domestic politics that don't really fit with what exactly is going on inside the country. So let's take the Middle East, for example. There's a huge outcry now about the fact that... I'll take Turkey, for example. The problem with the U.S. policy in, say, Syria and Iraq stems from the fact that the Obama administration waffled.

And the fact that... Waiver, excuse me. And that when it was presented with overwhelming evidence of Syrian chemical weapons use, Obama didn't enforce his red line. This is taken as indicative that Obama is weak. And then... It's extrapolated and built upon to say that, well, if he's weak, he's going to allow the Iranians to have a nuclear program in perpetuity, whether an enrichment program.

And so the Iranians will then be able to meddle around the region just like they are in Syria with no U.S. leadership whatsoever. Now, this argument doesn't make much sense from the proliferation side, but you can see how it says, well, then, you know, You can see how there are parallels with the Japanese argument, which is essentially that these regimes in the Middle East, Turkey, the Gulf states, security are ultimately tied to the U.S.

But they have very little leverage on the U.S. domestic debate about the trajectory of U.S. defense policy. So they're left feeling very uncomfortable. With certain aspects of U.S. defense policy and not really anything to do. Where I find problems with it, and I actually see parallels to this in the Japanese case and the South Asian case, is the way that we deal with it is by increased arms sales.

I'm not against increased arms sales as a way of getting leverage over your allies or deepening your influence with those allies. I just think with the increased spread of conventional weapons, you're creating very potential destabilizing factors down the road. And I'm not sure we've come up with a good way to manage the expectations of our allies in a very changed security environment after the end of the Cold War.

Jeffrey 19:27

It's interesting that you say that. So I was just at this meeting, right, the I was saying the lives of arms control wonks aren't that glamorous. How do I, how do I afford a vacation in France? And the answer is you go to a meeting in Paris that somebody buys your, your ticket for and pays for your hotel.

And yeah, so I was at this meeting in Paris and we were talking about the implications of the Ukraine crisis on the Alliance and foreign nuclear weapons. And we had this conversation. So we had it in a European context and, and I don't, It was a Chatham House rule meeting, but I'm pretty sure he won't mind me giving him credit for what I thought was a very astute argument.

Mark Fitzpatrick at IISS, the great Fitzpatrick, pointed out that because there was a fair amount of kvetching about the response to Russia and the seizure of Crimea, that the A lot of the arguments about credibility were selective. People were starting from their own views or worries, and then they were going out and selecting the evidence that supported it.

So they emphasized, as you say, Syria or Crimea. But nobody mentions the decision to go after bin Laden in Pakistan, even though that was a pretty risky maneuver where the president had Set a policy, right? I will go into Pakistan to get him no matter what. And he did it. And so there is this kind of selective reading of the evidence that looks like it's really designed to reinforce where people start from.

So it's not actually anything that the president does or doesn't do. It's just people are insecure. And so then they look around at all the things that they don't like about the president's policy and say, well, that adds up.

Aaron 21:23

You know, to, to, to this.

Jeffrey 21:25

And, and so I worry that a lot of our domestic criticisms of the president end up creating this kind of echo chamber when in fact, you know, I think the, the The correct thing, particularly for Americans to do, would be, you know, it's fine if you really genuinely think that the president's making a mistake. I wouldn't object to people pointing that out.

But a lot of the partisan rhetoric, which strikes me as being pretty overheated, and I guess you probably could have said this about Democrats during the Bush administration too, but when the rhetoric is just straight partisan, it's pretty harmful, I think. And, and as a counterpoint to that, I should say, I saw this once and I was, I was so impressed.

So Ed Fulner, who used to be the president of the heritage foundation, right? No lefty. And certainly not a person who likes the president. I saw him give a speech at the Asan Institute where he did such a good job about balancing his preference for a Republican president without needlessly undermining The credibility of the United States as a whole.

It was actually, I was really, I was impressed. I thought he did a nice job of balancing patriotism with his clear preference for a different president. But not everybody is so careful.

Aaron 23:02

Yeah, going back to the domestic debate and picking up on your point here, I can't remember the exact year. I want to say it was in 2010 or 2011, maybe 2009. There was that wacko Florida preacher with a parish of like – Is this the Koran burner? Yeah, the Koran burner. Oh, yeah, that guy. If you follow that on the domestic side of the US, you realize that every person of higher office, from the president down to the secretary of defense, tried to step in for a guy who does not matter.

I mean he's a guy who has like 10 people out in some Florida – A place where nobody lives. When I was in Turkey at the time living, and that whole side of the story wasn't told. It was front page news in terms of wacko in Florida burns Quran. It was on the front page of major international newspapers.

After that moment, I thought it was just a wonderful illustration of how nuance doesn't translate. If you follow the U.S. side, you get the nuance and you realize this guy is really way out there. If you don't have any understanding of the politics of which you are reading the news story, then you lack that nuance. And this is where I think we get back to countries' motivations for nuclear weapons and why most states will opt not to proliferate.

You can't really build your understanding of state decision-making on very... I would say, very small case studies that only account for certain periods of time. I think it's necessary to build very long case studies. This is a plug for my own dissertation, by the way. Very long case studies about countries in question, about nuclear incentives and disincentives.

I think what we would find is that most countries have... This very real problem of being completely dependent on the U.S. for the defense, Japan being the case we're talking about today, but no constituency to move beyond the nuclear threshold because all that comes with that. And the problems associated with proliferation, and I guess I'll say in the Japanese case, extreme aversion to developing nuclear weapons, giving the history.

So yeah, there may be a few guys who call for the... Development of a bomb, but they don't really matter politically, and so we should ignore them, and they get too much airtime. And just one last thing as I'm droning on here is that I think this is also happening in the U.S. debate, particularly about the Syria issue.

I mean, I find, say, John McCain, for example, to be pretty marginal in the Syria debate. I know he's a loud voice, but if you look at opinion polls, he's way out of step with the U.S. public, but yet we keep going to him and going to him and going to him for the counter Veiling argument to the president.

Is he really a counter-veiling argument? Does he have a constituency for his preferred policies in Syria and Iraq? I would ask the same question about people in Japan who say every once in a while they pop their head up and say, oh, we should build a bomb to counter China or North Korea.

Jeffrey 26:06

Well, and ultimately this gets to what was the kind of warning of the piece I wrote, which is when we focus on these marginal voices, not only do we miss the real dynamic of what's happening, which is really sort of interesting, right? And it's kind of a shame to miss it. But we also make it harder to do the things we want to do.

So we've been running this project at Monterey And I think I mentioned this sort of in passing, but I don't really sort of describe it in the piece. But we've been running a project on Japan's plutonium policies because we're worried not so much about a Japanese bomb as we are the example that they set in the way that they might make it harder, for example, to get a deal with Iran in which they forego reprocessing plutonium.

Aaron 26:59

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 27:00

And so we're not for or against reprocessing in Japan. I mean, that's an energy decision that has a lot of aspects to it. But we really wanted to make sure that at least the security parts got due attention. And whether that means you don't reprocess or whether that means you take a different approach to safeguards, that's a conversation you can have.

But one of the things that really came out of this Discussion was how frequently Americans well, first of all, how frequently other Asian nations used Japan's plutonium policies to accuse the Japanese of wanting a bomb and renewed militarism, right. And how that was often tactical. So anytime Japanese have the slightest Hiccup in terms of a declaration about plutonium or safeguards, even though their record is so much better than 99% of countries in the world, they just get attacked for it tactically.

But then Americans tend to play into this by emphasizing the possibility of a Japanese bomb, and that causes the Japanese participants to shut down. They just They're just sitting here getting kicked about this bomb that they're not going to build. And so we end up, you know, I found, at least in the context of our discussions, that it was really valuable to have the group Discuss and dispose of this kind of worry of a Japanese bomb, and that once the sides could do that, and the Japanese participants were no longer worried that every proposal or every sentence was a secret reference to their desire to rearm, they were free to be, I thought, really productive and really Engaged and really innovative about the stuff we can do.

I think we lose that opportunity if we always focus on the bomb they're not going to build.

Aaron 29:07

I've seen this exact same thing happen in the Turkish case. They're always mentioned as one of the three. If Iran goes, then surely Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey will And the explanations given for why they will follow suit is something along the lines of their strategic stability will be so affected by the fact that in the region, and there's a sectarian thing that always comes behind it, oh, and they won't accept a Shiite bomb being Sunni majority powers.

Right. Then they point to the Turkey's... Recent interest in restarting the nuclear program and how it just happened to coincide in 2006 and 2008 with the breakdown of the EU3 plus three talks. EU3 at that time, excuse me that you know, E3, EU plus three. Yeah, it was before the E3 plus three became the E3 plus three, and it was then just the EU3.

If I remember correctly.

Jeffrey 30:04

Oh, so this was in 2005 or 2006?

Aaron 30:06

Yeah. All I'm saying is that if you don't understand the context of which they're coming from, which is that they pursued this financing model, which all but precludes the option to build a bomb, your prediction is so out of character with what the Turks are actually trying to do that it completely shuts down conversation. Whereas they have been doing some really interesting things, particularly at the NSG about...

Going against black boxing and placing some sorts of more onerous restrictions on the transfer of enrichment and reprocessing. And we should be able to talk about that and why domestically they're against that, whereas the Bush administration at the time was in favor of it. And so I think sometimes our intense focus on non-proliferation actually prevents us I guess, real in-depth discussions about what exactly a country's civilian nuclear policy is.

Jeffrey 31:04

Well, and I think some of that comes from the poverty of the domino metaphor. And it's so bad, it's good. I mean, what I love about the domino metaphor is, what are dominoes? They're things that are solid, Opaque blocks with nothing happening in the inside and the only differences are, you know, sort of cosmetic features on the outside.

And that's totally the opposite of a real country, right? A real country is interesting precisely because they are all different because the inner workings of the politics and decision making on the inside are interesting and they cause states to do things that you know, are not uniform and, and, and so, you know, A domino by definition is unlike a country.

And so when we, I think, think about the world in terms of dominoes or billiard balls, we're basically missing out on the opportunity to engage with the actual constructive conversation within the country. Where, you know, there's often, I think, a lot more room for compromise than we realize. So that's why I wrote the piece. You know, the piece really was like, stop focusing on the extremist voices.

And actually, you mentioned the guy in Florida. I mean, I joked about that. I said, as an American, I understand first and foremost that you can't judge a country by its nut jobs. Yeah, it made me think of Calvin Bundy. Yeah, nobody makes better nut jobs than we do. But if you let those considerations dominate the debate, then you don't ever get to the real places where you share interests and can work constructively.

Aaron 32:56

I agree. Is that a positive note?

Jeffrey 32:59

I think so, which is probably where we should end it, right?

Aaron 33:02

Yeah, I think so. It's a positive note. It's a podcast first.

Jeffrey 33:07

Well, anyway, thanks for joining me, Aaron, and for our listeners. Thanks for joining us again.

Aaron 33:12

Thank you. Have a good one.