Japan will return a huge cache of plutonium — enough to produce 50 nuclear bombs — to the US starting this weekend as part of a bilateral storage deal, Greenpeace and other anti-nuclear campaigners said yesterday.
The stockpile, provided by the US, Britain and France decades ago for research purposes, has caused disquiet among anti-nuclear groups and neighboring countries given that Japan has the know-how to produce a nuclear weapon — even as it adamantly chooses not to.
About 331kg of plutonium are to be sent by “an armed British nuclear transport ship... under armed escort to the United States,” said a joint statement by five groups, including Greenpeace.
The departure from a port north of Tokyo “could occur as early as Sunday,” Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace, said by telephone.
The shipment, which comes ahead of a nuclear security summit in Washington from late this month, is meant to underscore both countries’ commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and is part of a 2014 deal.
“The material will be disposed of in the United States,” Tsukasa Yamamura, an official in the nuclear nonproliferation technology section at the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, said yesterday, referring to the deal.
However, the campaigners condemned the shipment as a “dangerous distraction” from what they said is a far larger cache of roughly 10 tonnes of plutonium in Japan.
“Hailing a shipment of hundreds of kilograms of plutonium as a triumph for nuclear security, while ignoring over 9 tonnes of the weapons material stockpiled in Japan and in a region of rising tensions, is not just a failure of nuclear non-proliferation and security policy but a dangerous delusion,” Burnie said.
A Japanese official in January confirmed the amount of plutonium to be sent to the US and said that preparations for the shipment were under way.
Yamamura declined to elaborate, saying: “We can’t comment on details such as the departure date and route for security reasons.”
It will take two months for the ship to arrive at a nuclear facility in South Carolina, the campaign groups said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese