Senior ruling coalition officials approved a plan Tuesday to put on hold additional deployments of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 interceptors for missile defense in fiscal 2010.
This will be followed by a government decision on whether to include its PAC-3 policy in an appendix of a new basic defense guideline scheduled to be compiled by October, government sources said, adding that any actual deployment will wait until fiscal 2011 or later.
The plan to deploy additional surface-to-air missiles was abandoned after Cabinet ministers, including Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, and the Social Democratic Party, which is part of the ruling bloc, indicated their reluctance to pursue it, the sources said.
The Defense Ministry has requested ¥94.4 billion in the fiscal 2010 budget for deploying PAC-3s at three Air Self-Defense Force bases, in Hokkaido, Aomori and Okinawa, over five years.
But some Cabinet ministers have opposed the plan, saying the deployment should be decided when the new defense guideline is compiled, they said.
The PAC-3 system constitutes the lower part of Japan's two-layer ballistic missile shield and is designed to shoot down missiles just before they reach their targets.
Supercomputer cuts
The science and technology ministry cut funding for a project to develop a next-generation supercomputer after a key government panel on curtailing wasteful spending urged that its ¥26.7 billion budget allocation be frozen, ministry officials said.
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology will no longer vigorously pursue the goal of completing the world's most advanced supercomputer system, they said.
The ministry plans to reset its target completion date for the project at 2012, the initial target year, which had earlier been changed to 2011.
As a result of the postponement, the United States is expected to jump ahead of Japan in supercomputer technology, according to the officials.