The town of Kadena in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture, which hosts a US military base, has strongly protested a planned US deployment of a Typhon missile launcher, which can fire Tomahawk missiles that have a range of over 1,000 miles, putting mainland China in range.
According to The Japan Times, the Okinawa Defense Bureau said the Typhon system will be stored at Kadena Air Base indefinitely and will be transferred there after it was deployed for the annual Orient Shield Exercises, which concluded on September 24.
Kadena Mayor Hiroshi Toyama has called the deployment “totally unacceptable,” and the town lodged a formal complaint to the Okinawa Defense Bureau, demanding the plan be withdrawn.
“I cannot help but feel extremely strong distrust towards the stance of both the Japanese and U.S. governments, which disregard the excessive burden of the bases on the townspeople,” Toyama said.
The Typhon system, which can also fire SM-6 missiles, was developed by the US following its withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, an agreement between the US and Russia that banned Washington and Moscow from developing land-based missile systems with a range between 310 and 3,400 miles.
The US first deployed a Typhon to the region in 2024, sending one to the Philippines, where it remains today. At the time, China said the move had “put the entire region under the fire of the United States (and) brought huge risks of war into the region.” This year, the US fired a Tomahawk missile during drills in the Philippines, a major provocation that was also strongly denounced by Beijing.
