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(回答先: 小沢発言は「政治的に危険」＝核問題シンクタンクが声明−米【ワシントン９日時事】 投稿者 SANETOMI 日時 2002 年 4 月 10 日 09:52:53)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Steven Dolley
Tuesday, April 9, 2002
202-822-8444; nci@nci.org
JAPAN CAN CONSTRUCT NUCLEAR BOMBS
USING ITS POWER PLANT PLUTONIUM
Opposition Leader Ozawaﾕs Statement is Technically Accurate,
Politically Dangerous, Says Nuclear Control Institute
WASHINGTON---Japanese Liberal Party leader Ichiro Ozawaﾕs recent statement that
Japan could easily produce ﾒthousands of nuclear warheadsﾓ using plutonium recovered from the
spent fuel of its commercial nuclear power reactors is technically accurate, the Nuclear Control
Institute (NCI) confirmed today.
Ozawa stated in a lecture delivered Saturday that ﾒif [China] gets too inflated,
Japanese people will get hysterical.ﾊ It would be so easy for us to produce nuclear warheadsﾑwe
have plutonium at nuclear power plants in Japan, enough to make several thousand such
warheadsﾉ.
[I]f we get serious, we will never be beaten in terms of military power.喨 His remarks were
widely reported in the Japanese press.
Ozawaﾕs nuclear threat would be an extraordinarily dangerous policy for Japan,
abandoning Japanese rejection of nuclear weapons under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
and it could destabilize all of Northeast Asia," said Dr. Edwin Lyman, scientific director and
soon-to-be president of NCI, a non-proliferation research and advocacy center.ﾊ ﾒHowever, it is
important to note that on a technical level, Ozawa is absolutely correct.ﾊ Despite deliberately
misleading claims by plutonium-fuel advocates in Japanﾕs nuclear power industry, the plutonium
separated from spent nuclear fuel by means of reprocessing---so-called ﾒreactor-grade
plutoniumﾓ---can indeed be used to build reliable nuclear weapons with enormous explosive
yield.
Japan currently possesses some 38 tons of reactor-grade plutonium, of which 5 tons
is stored in Japan and the rest in France and Great Britain, where Cogema and BNFL (the
state-owned French and British reprocessing corporations) separated the material from
Japanese spent fuel.ﾊ The Japanese government says it intends to use the plutonium in reactors
as mixed-oxide, plutonium-uranium fuel (known as ﾒMOXﾓ or ﾒpluthermalﾓ fuel).ﾊ However,ﾊ
Japanﾕs plutonium fuel program has been hit with numerous difficulties, including runaway
costs, multiple accidents and public rejection of introducing highly toxic MOXﾊ fuel in reactors.ﾊ
The result has been an enormous surplus of Japanese separated plutonium building up over the
last decade.
Japanﾕs plutonium program is simply unnecessary for meeting its energy-security needs
because of an abundance of cheap, readily available and non-weapons-usable uranium fuel,ﾓ
noted Paul Leventhal, NCIﾕs president, who will retire and become president emeritus on June 1.ﾊ
ﾒJapanﾕs accumulation of plutonium is already viewed as aﾊ threat by its neighbors in the region,
including both Koreas and China.ﾊ Ozawaﾕs claim that Japan could build thousands of nuclear
bombs from its reactor-grade plutonium is as politically dangerous as it is technically correct.ﾊ
The best way for Japan to reassure its neighbors of its peaceful intentions is not to plead that
its plutonium is innocent, but to halt the commercial plutonium program and to dispose of the
separated plutonium by immobilizing it in highly radioactive waste.ﾓ
On March 27, NCI hosted a seminar on ﾒJapan, Nuclear Weapons and Reactor-Grade
Plutonium,ﾓ at which Dr. Marvin Miller, MIT senior scientist emeritus, concluded that ﾒJapan is
at least at the intermediate point, and most probably at the high end of the weaponﾕs capability
spectrum.喨 While not implying and having no knowledge of a clandestine Japanese nuclear
weapons program, Miller found ﾒthat the competence of their scientists in related applications
indicates that they could make advanced weapons using reactor-grade plutonium if the political
decision is made to go ahead.喨 He concluded: ﾒIn my judgment, the nuclear weapon states,
particularly the United States, should strive to keep Japan as far as possible from the need to
seriously consider this issueﾉ.At the same time, safeguards and physical security on all existing
weapons-usable materials, including reactor-grade plutonium, need to be upgraded and their
stocks decreased.ﾓ
Over the past two decades, Japanese plutonium advocates have raised suspicions by making
numerous false or misleading claims about the weapons potential of reactor-grade plutonium.ﾊ
Nearly a decade ago, Ryukichi Imai, former Japanese ambassador for non-proliferation, wrote
that the reactor-grade plutonium shipped from France to Japan "is quite unfit to make a bomb."ﾊ
That same year, Hiroyoshi Kurihara, former executive director of PNC (then Japanﾕsﾊ primary
company for developing plutonium-fueled reactors) stated that "many Japanese experts express
the opinion that reactor-grade plutonium could not be used for workable nuclear weapons." He
speculated it "can be merely a nuclear fireworks, namely it produces glare and a big noise, but
would not cause big disastrous effects of nuclear bombs...." Such a weapon, he said, would "fizzle
like a firecracker."ﾊ In 1994, PNC distributed a video in which "Pluto Boy," a cartoon character
representing plutonium, reassures the audience that a workable bomb cannot really be made
from reactor-grade plutonium.ﾊ PNC was dissolved in 2000 in the wake of the disastrous nuclear
criticality accident, killing three workers, at its Tokai-mura facility where fuel was being
prepared for its Joyo experimental plutonium breeder reactor.
Despite Japanese denials, the ability to construct a weapon from plutonium separated from
the spent fuel of nuclear power plants was settled long ago. In 1976, the U.S. government first
declassified the information that reactor-grade plutonium could be used to make weapons and
could even be the basis for a national military program.ﾊ The following year, it declassified the
fact that the United States successfully detonated a nuclear bomb made from reactor-grade
plutonium at the Nevada Test Site in 1962.ﾊ In 1990, Hans Blix, then the director-general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reversed the agencyﾕs position on reactor-grade
plutonium and acknowledged to the Nuclear Control Institute that there is "no debate" at the
IAEA that virtually all isotopes of plutonium, including those that comprise reactor-grade
plutonium, are usable in nuclear weapons.ﾊ The U.S. Department of Energyﾕs current guidance
states that nuclear weapons of all levels of sophistication can be made from reactor-grade
plutonium and that ﾒproliferating states using designs of intermediate sophistication could
produce weapons with assured yields substantially higher than the kiloton-range possible with a
simple, first generation nuclear device.ﾓ
More information about Japanﾕs plutonium program is available on NCIﾕs website at
www.nci.org
http://www.nci.org/02NCI/04/pr040902.htm
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