Tokyo Starts to Develop Its Onw Tomahawk Soon

 

Japan is slated to develop its own version of Tomahawk missile

　Yomiuri Shimbun

November 20,2017

The editor

The Yomiuri Shimbun reported on November 20 that the government of of Japan (GOJ) has started to study feasibility to develop a brand new land attack cruise missile indigenously.  Initial development phase will be requested in fiscal 2018 budget plans that will start April 2018.

This is to add land attack capability to already-planned new anti-ship missile whose R&D study is going to start in fiscal 2018.

This would be the first of kind for Japan to develop land attack cruise missile; even though GOJ will insist that the new missile will be used when Japan will retake its distant island portion of its territory, presumably Senkaku Islands and such. However, theoretically, such cruise missile can be used to attack land facilities including missile launching pads in North Korea.

Such functions are already available with Raytheon's Tomahawk land attack cruise missile and GOJ officials call this new cruise missile concept ‘Japanese Tomahawk.’

Earlier this year, there was discussion among the leading politicians and GOJ to acquire Tomahawk missiles from U.S. to install on Aegis destroyers of the Maritime Self-Defense Force fleet.

Disturbed by several missile launching by North Korea particularly this year,there has been increasing talk on possible preemptive strike capability to be owned by Japan, based on assumption ‘We cannot sit down just watching those lousy North Korean missiles to be launched and coming over us.’

It should be true that ruling party LDP politicians were impressed by last April’s attack on the Syrian chemical weapons deposit by Tomahawk missile ordered by President Donald Trump.

However, the current constitution, especially Article 9, can be interpreted to prohibit Japan to own offensive weaponry and its use including preemptive strike and the ruling Liberal Democrats, actually righter than middle of the road, will be forced to issue new interpretation of the constitution that LDP wishes to amend since its birth in 1955.■