Koizumi to meet Finnish defense chief, with nuclear policy shift to top agenda

Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi will meet his Finnish counterpart next week, with the two expected to discuss Helsinki’s recent decision to revise a law allowing nuclear weapons into Finland — a decision that came as Japan weighs a similar shift in policy.

Koizumi will hold talks next Monday with Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen in Tokyo, the Defense Ministry said Friday. The meeting comes after Finland in March amended decades-old laws to allow the stationing of nuclear weapons on its soil, in a move Helsinki said aligns more closely with NATO’s deterrence policy amid Russia’s more than 4-year-old war against Ukraine.

“In recent years, Finland has been pursuing a fundamental strengthening of its security policy,” Koizumi told reporters Friday. “One example of this is a legislative amendment allowing the introduction of nuclear weapons.” 

The Japanese defense chief said the two ministers would “engage in a broad exchange of views on both countries’ security policies — including Finland’s threat assessments and policies.”

In a TV interview late last month, Koizumi said that Japan must have a debate on nuclear issues “without taboos,” considering the nuclear capabilities of adversaries like China and Russia, as well as North Korea’s own expanding atomic weapons and missile programs.

Pointing to France, which is expanding its arsenal to provide Europe with a “nuclear umbrella,” and Finland’s nuclear amendment, Koizumi said that there is a global shift in thinking and that taboos are now being set aside amid an increasingly fraught security environment both in Asia and worldwide.

Monday’s meeting will be held as the Japanese government ramps up discussions on revising key documents outlining Tokyo’s security policy by the year’s end. This includes a possible revision of its long-held “three nonnuclear principles” and a proposal to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. 

The 1967 nonnuclear principles say that Japan, the sole country to be attacked with nuclear arms, shall not produce, possess or host the weapons. 

But talk has grown of revising the third provision and allowing U.S. nuclear weapons to be brought into Japan after Takaichi sidestepped a question about her commitment to maintaining the pledge in its entirety last November in parliament. 

One approach to revising the principles could be to formally allow port calls by U.S. Navy ships that will eventually be equipped with nuclear-tipped missiles. This would build on the current exception that effectively lets the government in power decide, in emergencies, whether to temporarily allow the port calls of American vessels carrying such weapons, as outlined by then-Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada in 2011.

Such an amendment to the principles would align with Takaichi’s past stated views.

In her 2024 book “Kokuryoku Kenkyu” (“National Strength Research”), she wrote that the principles of neither possessing nor producing nuclear weapons “should be maintained,” but said not allowing their introduction “is unrealistic if we expect the U.S. to offer us ‘extended deterrence,’” a reference to Washington’s nuclear umbrella.

Koizumi, for his part, has repeatedly stated that all options remain on the table in terms of revisions to the principles.