Don’t Bomb Iran

As the Australian Lateline program reported Japan is about to start reprocessing its stockpile of over 50 tons of plutonium (enough for thousands of nuclear weapons), with no good explanation of what it wants to do with it and great proliferation concern.
Edwin Lyman of the Unions of Concerned Scientiests says  “It provides a latent proliferation capability. This is the same concern that the world has about Iran. The fact is that plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years. So this means it will be around for hundreds of thousand of years. Plutonium is essentially forever, but political parties and institutions are finite.”  see also the Union of Concerned Scientists page on Japan proliferstion
“Japan is about to become one of the world’s largest producers of plutonium, launching a new nuclear reprocessing plant. Japan says it needs the facility to reduce its reliance on uranium imports, and to deal with the growing pile of waste from the 50-plus nuclear reactors it already operates. But critics say the move is unnecessary and encourages emerging nuclear states like Iran to pursue their own nuclear program. .. Japan has already has a 40-tonne stockpile of plutonium… Critics point out that, while the new plant is about to open, Japan hasn’t yet built the factory that will turn the plutonium into the new MOX fuel, nor has it yet approved any reactors to use it.”