This opinion article first appeared in the Washington Post.

Most world leaders, including President Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, agree that the defense of Taiwan is crucial for regional security. But most options for improving deterrence will take too long. Building Taiwan’s self-defense, developing more U.S. firepower in the region, creating the economic resilience to make severe sanctions feasible: None of these will come to fruition before 2030.

Japan could change the game now. Allied forces, responding immediately and en masse, have a chance of thwarting a Chinese invasion, according to a recent report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies. But, in meetings with high-level officials in Tokyo last month, I sensed a mismatch between talk and walk. Japan must broaden its vision of self-defense to encompass priorities and declaratory policies that will avert calamity in the region. Tokyo cannot wait until war breaks out to start the tougher conversations.

Here’s why.

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First, without Japan, the United States could be outgunned in a fight to defend Taiwan, notwithstanding Washington’s new basing agreement with the Philippines. A combined U.S.-Japan fleet, on the other hand, would boast more than three times as many aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers as the People’s Liberation Army Navy. The quality of many Japanese ships approaches that of its U.S. counterparts. Eight of Japan’s destroyers field a state-of-the-art Aegis weapons system used by some of the more advanced ships in the U.S. Navy.

Second, Japan’s involvement could mitigate some of the geographic vulnerabilities of the United States. Adding Japanese bases more than doubles the locations from which the two countries together could conduct operations. Japan’s southwestern islands are closer to Taiwan than mainland China. Take Yonaguni Island, just about 70 miles from Taiwan’s east coast. On it are intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, as well as anti-ship and anti-aircraft capabilities. Operating from these bases in the defense of Taiwan, allied forces would have more opportunities to quickly target an invading force. That would make attacks on U.S. bases in Japan, such as Kadena, at the southernmost tip of the archipelago, less attractive to the Chinese. Such strikes would no longer completely cripple an air effort.

Third, Japan has military strengths that would make a fait accompli almost impossible for China. Though Japanese diesel submarines are slower than U.S. counterparts, they could reach the Taiwan Strait in just two days. U.S. submarines departing from Hawaii would take at least a week; from San Diego even longer. This makes Japan the first line of defense for Taiwan. Japanese boats could also monitor key choke points through which Chinese navy submarines would be attempting to exit the First Island Chain in the western Pacific. This would free up the quieter submarines of the U.S. Navy to wreak havoc on amphibious vessels and escort ships.

In short, Tokyo could contribute significantly to a military effort to deny China the ability to take Taiwan by force. To do so, Japan must increase its stockpile of torpedoes and long-range strike weapons, as planned. Tokyo must be willing to go after the amphibious invasion force and targets on mainland China — a very controversial proposition indeed.

On the surface, it looks as if Japan is moving in the right direction. The government took the groundbreaking historic step of increasing defense spending to 2 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product over the next five years. This meant a whopping 26.3 percent increase in 2023 alone. The greatest increase in the past was in 1986, by nearly 50 percent.

Last year, former prime minister Shinzo Abe stated that the security of Japan is connected to Taiwan. He said a Chinese use of force against a U.S. vessel defending Taiwan could legally trigger the deployment of Japan’s military (known as the Self-Defense Force).

Indeed, a 2015 law allows Japan to engage in collective defense when presented with an existential threat. This provides plenty of flexibility for Japan to fight alongside the United States without the need for a constitutional amendment. The officials I spoke with in Tokyo were firm that Japan would respond if China attacked U.S. bases such as Kadena.

But all these initiatives concern self-defense. Japan does worry that military activity around Taiwan could extend to the security of its southwestern islands. Or that if China takes Taiwan, it would be emboldened to take the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, which Tokyo administers but which China also claims. There are even concerns that Okinawa, a group of 160-plus islands that is home to 1.4 million people (and dozens of U.S. bases), could then prove enticing to Beijing.

Crudely, Japan seems to be prepared to push back against only Chinese assets that are clearly poised to attack its sovereign territory. Those heading toward Taiwan? Not so much.

While a degree of strategic ambiguity makes sense, too much could backfire. If Japan is clearly unwilling to defend Taiwan, then improvements in Japanese military capabilities will do little to deter conflict across the strait. Japanese officials don’t need to say they would attack any Chinese invading forces, but they need to let their counterparts know it is a real possibility. The officials I met were unwilling to send such strong messages; some insisted reassuring Beijing was more important.

Tokyo must make clear at home and abroad that defending Taiwan is no longer off the table. The prospect of Japan engaging in offensive operations in the defense of Taiwan would stay Chinese President Xi Jinping’s hand. Only then would recent monumental changes in Japanese politics fulfill their potential in contributing to peace and security in Asia. If Ukraine has taught us anything, it is that deterrence is costly, but war is worse.

As a farmer, Atsuo Tanizaki did not care much for the state’s maps of radioactive contamination. Colour-coded zoning restrictions might make sense for government workers, he told me, but ‘real’ people did not experience their environment through shades of red, orange and green. Instead, they navigated the landscape one field, one tree, one measurement at a time. ‘Case by case,’ he said, grimly, as he guided me along the narrow paths that separated his rice fields, on the outskirts of a small village in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture.

It was spring in 2016 when I first visited Tanizaki’s farm. The air was warm. The nearby mountains were thick with emerald forests of Japanese cedar, konara oak and hinoki cypress. A troop of wild red-faced monkeys stopped foraging to watch us as we walked by. And woven through it all – air, water, land, plants, and living bodies – were unseen radioactive pollutants. Almost everything now carried invisible traces of the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Continue reading at aeon.co

On March 11, 2011, Koide Hiroaki was in his laboratory in Kyoto, Japan. It was a gray, wet afternoon, and the 61-year-old nuclear engineer was hard at work when the earthquake hit. Fifteen miles beneath the surface of the sea, one tectonic plate rumbled beneath another. A slippery clay layer helped the great pieces of crust slide, releasing centuries of stress. The seabed rose up 16 stories, and slipped sideways 165 feet.

Read the rest at National Geographic

The archival record makes clear that killing large numbers of civilians was the primary purpose of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; destruction of military targets and war industry was a secondary goal and one that “legitimized” the intentional destruction of a city in the minds of some participants. The atomic bomb was detonated over the center of Hiroshima. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were killed immediately; the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed. Such a nuclear attack would be illegal today. It would violate three major requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions: the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. There could be great pressure to use nuclear weapons in future scenarios in which many American soldiers’ lives are at risk and there is no guarantee that a future US president would follow the law of armed conflict. That is why the United States needs senior military officers who fully understand the law and demand compliance and presidents who care about law and justice in war.

Read the rest at Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

On the quiet Friday afternoon of March 11, 2011, Natsuo* was working in Fukushima, the capital city of Fukushima prefecture. At 2:46 p.m., a devastating earthquake of 9.0 magnitude hit the Pacific coast of Japan, where the prefecture of Fukushima is situated. Natsuo recalled to me the sheer power of this earthquake: “The whole office shook like hell, everything began to fall from the walls. I thought to myself ‘That’s it … I’m going to die!’”

Natsuo quickly returned to her hometown of Koriyama City, unaware that the earthquake had triggered a massive tsunami, which inundated an important part of the prefectural shoreline and ultimately claimed the lives of nearly 20,000 people. On top of the initial devastation, the tsunami severely damaged the Fukushima Dai’ichi Nuclear Power Plant, in Ōkuma, Fukushima, located on the east coast of Fukushima prefecture. She later learned on TV that something “seemed wrong” with the nuclear power plant. “During that time,” she said, “I tried to get as much information as I could, but the media weren’t being clear on the situation.”

Read the rest at Sapiens

Nearly ten years after meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant caused a nuclear disaster, researchers have uncovered important new information about the extent and severity of the meltdown and the distribution patterns of the plutonium that have broad implications for understanding the mobility of plutonium during a nuclear accident.

According to a paper published July 8 in Science of the Total Environment, microscopic particles emitted during the disaster contained not only high concentrations of radioactive cesium, as previously reported, but also the toxic metal plutonium. These microscopic radioactive particles formed inside the Fukushima reactors when the melting nuclear fuel interacted with the reactor’s structural concrete.

“The study used an extraordinary array of analytical techniques in order to complete the description of the particles at the atomic-scale,” said Rod Ewing, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University.

Ewing collaborated with researchers from Kyushu University, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo Institute of Technology, National Institute of Polar Research, University of Helsinki, Paul Scherrer Institute, Diamond Light Source and SUBATECH (IMT Atlantique, CNRS, University of Nantes).

The researchers found that, due to loss of containment in the reactors, the particles were released into the atmosphere and many were then deposited many kilometers from the reactor sites. Studies have shown that the cesium-rich microparticles, or CsMPs, are highly radioactive and primarily composed of glass (with silica from concrete) and radio-cesium (a volatile fission product formed in the reactors). But the environmental impact and their distribution is still an active subject of research and debate. The new work offers a much-needed insight into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, (FDNPP) meltdowns.

Geochemist Satoshi Utsunomiya and graduate student Eitaro Kurihara of Kyushu University led the team that used a combination of advanced analytical techniques, including synchrotron-based micro-X-ray analysis, secondary ion mass spectrometry, and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, to find and characterize the plutonium that was present in the CsMP samples. The researchers initially discovered incredibly small uranium-dioxide inclusions, of less than 10 nanometers in diameter, inside the CsMPs; this indicated possible inclusion of nuclear fuel inside the particles.

Detailed analysis revealed, for the first-time, that plutonium-oxide concentrates were associated with the uranium, and that the isotopic composition of the uranium and plutonium matched that calculated for the FDNPP irradiated fuel inventory.

“These results strongly suggest that the nano-scale heterogeneity that is common in normal nuclear fuels is still present in the fuel debris that remains inside the site’s damaged reactors,” said Utsunomiya. “This is important information as it tells us about the extent [and] severity of the meltdown. Further, this is important information for the eventual decommissioning of the damaged reactors and the long-term management of their wastes.”

With regards to environmental impact, Utsunomiya said, “as we already know that the CsMPs were distributed over a wide region in Japan, small amounts of plutonium were likely dispersed in the same way.”

Gareth T. W. Law, a co-author on the paper from the University of Helsinki, said the team “will continue to experiment with the CsMPs, in an effort to better understand their long-term behavior and environmental impact. It is now clear that CsMPs are an important vector of radioactive contamination from nuclear accidents.”

Bernd Grambow, a coauthor from Nantes/France, said, “While the plutonium released from the damaged reactors is low compared to that of cesium; the investigation provides crucial information for studying the associated health impact.”

Utsunomiya emphasized that this is a great achievement of international collaboration. “It’s been almost ten years since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima,” he said, “but research on Fukushima’s environmental impact and its decommissioning are a long way from being over.”

Ewing is also the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security, a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spoglie Institute for International Studies and. Professor of Geological Sciences in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). Co-authors of the paper include Eitaro Kurihara, Masato Takehara, Mizuki Suetake, Ryohei Ikehara, Tatsuki Komiya, Kazuya Morooka, Ryu Takami, Shinya Yamasaki, Toshihiko Ohnuki, Kenji Horie, Mami Takehara, Gareth T. W. Law, William Bower, J. Frederick. W. Mosselmans, Peter Warnicke, Bernd Grambow, Rodney C. Ewing, and Satoshi Utsunomiya

Integration of analytical techniques was accomplished through an international network that included Kyushu University, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo Institute of Technology, National Institute of Polar Research, University of Helsinki, Paul Scherrer Institute, Diamond Light Source, SUBATECH (IMT Atlantique, CNRS, University of Nantes) and Stanford University.  

This article was adapted from a press release produced by Kyushu University.

Read Particulate plutonium released from the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns

Media contacts:

Josie Garthwaite

School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences

(650)497-0949, josieg@stanford.edu

Jody Berger

Center for International Security and Cooperation

(303)748-9657, jody.berger@stanford.edu

This article examines a set of public controversies surrounding the role of nuclear power and the threat of radioactive contamination in a post-Fukushima Japan. The empirical case study focuses on the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Japan most influential ministry and, more importantly, the former regulator of nuclear energy before the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Through participant observation of METI’s public conferences, as well as interviews with state and non-state actors, I examine how particular visions of nuclear power continue to affect the basis of expert authority through which state actors handle post-Fukushima controversies and their subsequent uncertainties. In its post-Fukushima representations, METI frames nuclear power as an apolitical necessity for the well-being of the Japanese nation-state and the common humanity. It does so by mobilizing categories of uncertainty around specific political scenes, such as global warming. For METI, the potential uncertainties linked with the abandonment of nuclear power have the power to trigger political turmoil of a higher scale than those linked with Fukushima’s radioactive contamination. A form of double depoliticization takes place, in which the issue of Fukushima’s radioactive contamination gets depoliticized through perceived priorities that are paradoxically depicted as ‘post-political’ – that is, in an urgent need for immediate action and not open to in-depth deliberation. I refer to this process as establishing ‘post-political uncertainties’. This kind of depoliticization raises ethical questions surrounding meaningful public participation in decisions that happen at the intersection of politics and science and technology study.

Read the rest at Social Studies of Science