Tuesday, April 15, 2014

New Clear Nippon

Shinshin!!

The land of
backward comics, Harijuku Girls, and cool robots - Japan is HOT! Instead of scary missiles and secret police - Japan built a fun, rich democratic tech saavy, tolerant, egalitarian society with a free, uncensored press, transparent, periodic elections, and independent judiciary that hasn't bothered anyone in over six decades.

A literacy rate of over 99%, Nippon is a wonderful example of the human spirit unbound.Japan has been a long time ally of Great Satan for eons -- and has the world's second (or third, based on purchasing power parity) largest economy, 2nd biggest contributer to UN, yet Nippon remains dependent on America for its security, a minor military player despite having global economic and political interests.
And that last piece is changing

Japan plans to go way beyond the last millennium's 'Self Defense Force" chiz and be all bulking up for regional puissance!

And that means - New Clear Ambiguity

Although Japan does not have nuclear weapons, she has a nuclear weapons policy. The strategy was set out by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1969 in an internal document whose existence was kept secret until the daily Mainichi Shimbun published it in 1994. That paper states that “for the time being we will maintain the policy of not possessing nuclear weapons” but also “keep the economic and technical potential for the production of nuclear weapons, while seeing to it that Japan will not be interfered with in this regard.” Known as “technological deterrence,” this posture is inherently ambiguous, and has been made more so still by the ministry’s insistence that the document was a research paper rather than a statement of policy. 
In a 2000 essay about the future of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the disarmament advocate Jonathan Schell drew a distinction between capacity and intention in describing the range of positions states may adopt on nuclear weapons. At the time, Sweden had the capacity to produce such weapons but not the intention; Libya had the intention but not the capacity. Japan, by contrast, stands out as the only nation that has both the capacity and the intention to produce nuclear weapons but does not act on its intention. she has pioneered a type of nuclear deterrence that relies not on any overt threat, but on the mere suggestion of a latent possibility.

Pic - "What's that you got on? Is it comte d'guerr ensembe?"

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