Japan, Poland, and Tomahawk Land Attack Missile - Nuclear (TLAM-N)

None of this will sit well with conventional thinkers, including ourselves.

For whatever it is worth, here are the heads-ups we received, nevertheless.

It started with this article Japan: Save the Endangered Tomahawk! published this last Friday, and brought to our attention by one of our embedded sources. Make of it what you will.

The article included these tidbits:

This summer Japanese embassy officials in Washington quietly but strongly lobbied against American plans to retire the nuclear version of the Tomahawk in the context of the Congressional Commission on Strategic Posture of the United States. ..."In Asia extended deterrence relies heavily on the deployment of nuclear cruise missiles on some Los Angeles-class attack submarines…it has become clear that some allies in Asia would be very concerned about [Tomahawk] retirement.

"For many of the Cold War years, Tokyo didn't fret about the nuclear umbrella or America's will to use nuclear weapons should Japan be attacked. But in those years nuclear weapons were more clearly evident in Northeast Asia. American aircraft carriers were believed to carry nuclear bombs when making port calls, and tactical nuclear weapons were based in South Korea.

President George H W Bush ordered that the nuclear bombs be withdrawn from Korea and from aboard US navy ships, excepting ballistic missile submarines, back in 1991. American nuclear attack submarines no longer carry the nuclear tipped Tomahawks as a matter of routine. The weapons are stored on US soil.

The new government headed by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has not, so far as is known, made any efforts to block the retirement of the supposedly obsolete weapons systems.

Unnamed sources piled on more gauzy rumor:

President Obama will have a second term, because that has been his political opponents' master strategy all along, inlcuding Sen. John McCain's defeat. [That much we had suspected]

Obama's opponents have more or less promised Polish leadership a retired Ohio-class sub, when available, to make up for the anti-missile defense system they were promised and denied. In other words, the Poles will get some kind of second-strike capability after Obama's second term ends in 2016. [This we found particularly difficult to comprehend; it appears to make little sense in M.E.'s opinion]

Submarines are always silent and strange.