The U.S. State Department considered arming Japan with nuclear weapons in the early 1960s as a strategic counterweight to China's military buildup, which included an atomic weapons program, according to a document obtained by Kyodo News.
The document, stored at the National Archives in Maryland, is a secret internal memo titled "Chinese Communist Nuclear Explosion." It was produced in the department's Far Eastern Bureau and dated Dec. 3, 1962.
It shows that some U.S. officials were mulling the possibility of arming the Self-Defense Forces under an arrangement comparable with the joint management of nuclear forces between the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
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