Japan’s recent amendment to its atomic energy law is rekindling fears about its formidable nuclear and missile technologies that experts say could quickly turn it into an atomic weapons power.

Its parliament on Wednesday passed the revision to the Atomic Energy Basic Act including “national security” among its goals. The revision was the first in 34 years.

“The safe use of atomic power is aimed at contributing to the protection of the people’s life, health and property, environmental conservation and national security,” the revised text reads.

In separate space agency legislation, the Diet also deleted a phrase that confined its activities to “peaceful purposes.” With the revision, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency would be allowed to help develop spy and early warning satellites.

Despite political and legal constraints at home and abroad, the modified laws prompted anxiety that it could provide legal justification for Japan’s development of atomic weapons.

Tokyo is estimated to have up to 1,400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and about 30 tons of plutonium extracted spent fuel from reprocessing facilities in Japan, the U.K. and France.

With its technological prowess, it has the potential to create roughly 6,000 Hiroshima-level bombs, physical scientists and nuclear experts say.

“Given its top-notch science technology and skills to transport and fire long-range rockets, Japan can make hundreds of warheads to mount on them in just six months to one year if it insists,” Son Yong-woo of the University of North Korean Studies told The Korea Herald.

“That’s the reason for grave concern. North Korea’s nuclear crisis has come a long way to trigger such a bad impact.”

Japan has built up its nuclear capability since the late 1950s while pursuing civilian space programs. It successfully put its first rocket into orbit in 1970 and mastered the nuclear fuel cycle in the 1980s ― from producing to loading for electricity, to disposing and reprocessing.

Japan’s hardliner politicians including some right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers have been pushing to develop nuclear military capability, a call that is gaining greater backing in the face of China’s rapid emergence and North Korea’s constant saber-rattling.

Former prime minister Taro Aso often called for a national debate on whether Japan should have fission bombs. Tokyo’s outspoken Governor Shintaro Ishihara is one of the most prominent nuclear weapons advocates.

“All our enemies, China, North Korea and Russia ― all close neighbors ― have nuclear weapons. People talk about the cost and other things but the fact is that diplomatic bargaining power means nuclear weapons,” Ishihara said in a 2011 interview with The Independent.

The Atomic Energy Basic Act, a regulatory and institutional framework for its nuclear activities, laid a legal framework for Japan’s three non-nuclear principles in which it commits to “not possessing, producing or permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons.” It also formed the basis for the 1992 Joint Declaration on Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which North Korea is criticized for breaching.

The phrase of national security guarantee was not included in the initial proposal by the Cabinet but later inserted at the request of the LDP during parliamentary debate, The Tokyo Shimbun daily reported.

Japanese pacifists protested that the revision could lead to the nation’s diversion of nuclear energy to military purposes.

“We cannot rule out the possibility for practical military use. The amendment harmed the national interest and is a source of calamity,” said Committee of Seven for World Peace, founded by Hideki Yukawa, a physicist and Japan’s first Nobel Prize laureate who has been spearheading an international anti-nuclear crusade.

Tokyo officials downplayed such concerns and rebuffed any intention to divert nuclear power for military applications.

“Japan has never wavered in its commitment to the peaceful use of atomic power and the three non-nuclear principles. The government has no goal at all for its military use,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said Thursday.

Any development of atomic devices would face obstacles. Tokyo is bound to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, an international accord aimed at preventing the spread of atomic weapons and related technology. All nuclear plants worldwide are also under heavy scrutiny by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“In principle, it would be not as easy for Japan to transform into a nuclear-armed country as mentioned in some news reports given its membership of the NPT,” Foreign Ministry deputy spokesperson Han Hye-jin told reporters in Seoul.

Japan is likely to face pressure from Seoul, Washington, Beijing and other countries to provide a more convincing account for the recent series of steps toward nuclear armament.

Japan was one of the last nations to sign the pact in 1970 and ratified it six years later only when the U.S. promised not to interfere with Tokyo’s acquisition of plutonium and pursuit of independent reprocessing capabilities at its commercial power plants.

Under a 1968 agreement, the U.S. provided the enriched uranium for Japanese reactors until it approved Tokyo’s reprocessing in Europe and own facilities and breeder reactors.

Public confidence in nuclear energy remains fragile in the aftermath of the Fukushima meltdown. Until the March 2011 disaster, Japan was the world’s third-largest nuclear power producer, after the U.S. and France, sourcing more than 30 percent of its electricity from 54 reactors.

By Shin Hyon-hee (heeshin@heraldcorp.com)