Japan Was 'Days Away From Test' Of A-Bomb

Independent (UK) ^ | 8-5-2002

[blam]

Japan was 'days away from test' of A-bomb

By David McNeill in Tokyo
05 August 2002

Japan's secret plans to build its own atom bomb have resurfaced with the uncovering of a dossier smuggled out of the country at the end of the Second World War.

The papers, containing crude diagrams for a small nuclear weapon, were part of a six-year effort by military scientists to make the country the world's first nuclear power.

According to yesterday's Asahi newspaper, the American widow of a Japanese researcher, who fled to the US with the document in 1945, has returned it to the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, where he worked during the war. The researcher, Kazuo Kuroda, who later became a professor at the University of Arkansas, kept the document secret for half a century until his death in America in April last year.

The liberal-left Asahi, which seems to be the only Japanese media organisation to have picked up the story, says the military ordered the destruction of the plans the day before Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945. Scientists at the institute, however, thought this was "a waste" and decided to save at least part of the plans by giving them to Mr Kuroda.

Although suppressed in postwar Japanese education, the race by imperial scientists to develop the bomb has long been the stuff of wartime legend. Scientists at secret bases in Korea worked furiously to make a viable weapon before abandoning the facilities to the advancing Red Army.

Several historians have claimed Japan was days away from testing an atomic weapon in Nagoya when Hiroshima was obliterated by one American bomb on 6 August 1945.

The discovery of the dossier comes as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was bombed on 9 August, are preparing to commemorate the deaths of more than 250,000 nuclear victims.

[Servant of the Nine]

Yes, (it gave itself up in newfoundland... and had about 400 LBS of Uranium oxide.)

That is hardly a start on a bomb. We had diagrams of a bomb and plenty of yellow cake (Uranium Oxide) in 1941.

It took the Manhatten Project to turn those two items into a working bomb. Neither Japan nor Germany had the spare industrial capacity to attempt anything on that scale.

This story is just sensationalism in hopes of selling a book.

So9

[rightwing2]

I suggest you go read some detail of the Japanese defense of Okinawa, and ponder on the fact that the Japanese were already "beaten" at this point in time, if you listen to the crowd braying about U.S. "war crimes" for A-bombing Japan. Our decision makers figured we were looking at Okinawa times 20 or 50, when they wisely decided to shock the Japanese command/political structure with the A-bombs.

I do not have the time to re-shred the knowingly false/bogus argument of one million US dead made by the Truman Administration at the time. This was the subject of my 20 page senior paper more many years ago. More accurate intel estimates for an invasion of the Jap home islands provided to Truman were about 44,000 KIA, not 1,000,000! Of course, Japan WAS beaten. It had no navy, no air force, its cities were smashed to rubble. It was bordering starvation. Its army was trapped in northern China and Manchuria and the rabble that was left to defend the home islands could not be expected to put up much of a defense.

This all ignores the larger point that an invasion of Japan was not necessary. Japan had been trying to surrender in one form or another since late 1944 or early 1945 at the latest through Russian intermediaries at first and later to the US, which refused their requests at a "conditional" surrender. Their only condition--retention of the Emporer. Guess what! We ended up accepting that condition, but only after needlessly killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Jap civilians by firebombing and atomic bombing. The atomic bombings in particular constituted a terrorist attack which makes the 9-11 bombing which killed "only" 3,000 innocents pale in comparison. They will stand as a blot on the good flag of the United States until one day we have a President with the moral courage and the good Christian vision to apologize for it.

However, even if Japan had not been defeated and trying to surrender for months, the atomic bombings would have constituted a war crime, which is defined as the deliberate mass murder of innocent civilians by a warring power/party. The mass murder of innocents is always immoral and unjusifiable whether by Hitler, Osama Bin Laden or a US President and the good ole US of A!

[E Rocc]

This all ignores the larger point that an invasion of Japan was not necessary. Japan had been trying to surrender in one form or another since late 1944 or early 1945 at the latest through Russian intermediaries at first and later to the US, which refused their requests at a "conditional" surrender. Their only condition--retention of the Emporer. Guess what! We ended up accepting that condition, but only after needlessly killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Jap civilians by firebombing and atomic bombing.

Even when the emperor decided to surrender, there was an attempt at a coup by the Japanese military. They would have fought to the finish, killing huge numbers of our troops.

A nation at war has the right to prefer to kill enemy civilians instead of losing its soldiers. Especially when the other side started it.

-Eric

[rightwing2]

A nation at war has the right to prefer to kill enemy civilians instead of losing its soldiers. Especially when the other side started it.

Well with that kind of murderous rationale, I guess you could justify Saddam's atomization of millions of our American countrymen and whole cities because the US, not Iraq started it. Great reasoning, there! Demented reasoning to be sure. In truth, a nation at war has no right to kill the innocent even if it "saves" the lives of some of its soldiers. As a veteran Army officer (and lifelong student of war) who served in a combat branch I can say that with credibility.

[Colonel_Flagg]

Closer to '69, I think it was. A real classic!

From "That Was The Year That Was" -- 1965. My vintage, in fact. :)

[Colonel_Flagg]

Japan had been trying to surrender in one form or another since late 1944 or early 1945 at the latest through Russian intermediaries at first and later to the US, which refused their requests at a "conditional" surrender.

Not exactly. Molotov never met with any Japanese emissary to act as go-between for a Japanese capitulation. The only time he did meet was to inform the Japanese ambassador that Russian troops were attacking the Japanese Army in Manchuria. All the efforts to start negotiations came from the Japanese side, but did not occur until the summer of 1945.

That said, when the Soviets refused to negotiate with the Japanese, the Army readied for a defense of the home islands with the goal of hitting the Americans on the beaches hard enough to then sue for peace on grounds more favorable to Japan. Marquis Kido, the Lord Privy Seal during the summer of 1945, said after the war that without the bomb, the Japanese probably could not have stopped fighting.

[FreedomPoster]

One million dead is hyperbole, one million casualties is not. Not sure which was actually argued by the Truman Administration.

All of your arguments about a "beaten" Japan held at the time of Okinawa as well. "Senior paper" notwithstanding, go read some detail on what went down there; the Japanese Army, even knowing it was beaten, pretty much dug in and fought to the last man, causing huge U.S. casualties. We had every reason to believe we would see more of same, and worse, on the core Home Islands. Read about the civilian casualties on Okinawa. If these were scaled up to the Home Islands, even fractionally, I assure you the civilian deaths would have been many more than the, What? Less than 200,000? that were experienced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It can easily be argued that dropping the A-bombs saved Japanese civilian lives, and calling that action unnecessary "war crimes" is historical revisionism at best. At worst, it's Orwellian NewSpeak.

[Right Wing Professor]

A fantasy article that is incompetently attempting to rewrite history.

Agree completely. The US had the best physicists and mathmaticians in the world working on the project. Apart from the materiel aspects, Japan simply didn't have the intellectual machinery to do it.

Why anyone would give the slightest credence to anything published in the Independent is beyond me. The Enquirer has more credibility.

[Illbay]

I've never heard that story but it's preposterous. It is nearly impossible to "accidentally explode" an atom bomb. The trick isn't to KEEP it from exploding, but to hope and pray that the entire sequence goes right and there's not a dud.

[Illbay]

The Germans ... were always behind us in the technologies that counted (such as atomic weapons, computers, mass production, and cryptography).

Oh, come now. Do you not consider the V-1/V-2 weapons, and the first jet aircraft to be significant wartime technologies?

[lavrenti]

I'm rather surprised and amused by this argument about Sgt.Maj., considering one of my cousins retired as one.

[KC_Conspirator]

While I find this article interesting and the possibility that Japan was closer to the A-bomb than we thought, I think that the claims are rather dubious.

Regardless, I fully expect that any serious dicussion of this issue will be swept under the rug by leftist academics who propagate historical revisionism that Japan was some sort of innocent victim of rascist America. I remember some years ago that some liberal professor tried to push the notion that America did not need to drop the bomb on Japan. His presentation was filled with half truths, lies, and the omission of facts that were obviously designed to fool the average college student.

[andy_card]

Taiwan has the bomb. As does Japan. And plenty of countries could assemble the bomb in about 45 minutes, from parts on hand if they wanted to - including South Korea, Italy, Germany, Canada, etc.

Fortunately, we won't have to worry about the Germans. We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then...

[Big Bunyip]

The question of whether heisenberg deliberately nudged the german a-bomb effort up a blind alley is intriguing. The surveillance wiretaps from the english country house where the Hun boffins were all held at war's end indicate otherwise, that his calculations were simply wrong and that he would have given Hitler the bomb had he not simply screwed up the math.

But could the father of the uncertainty principle have committed such a dopey error? And would he have admitted as much to his incarcerated colleagues? Inquiring minds want to know -- and will probably go on wanting to know forever and a day.

[DoughtyOne]

To: blam; SLB; Sawdring; Scholastic; DoughtyOne; belmont_mark; sonofliberty2

This is nothing but historical revisionism designed to justify our mindless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent Jap civilians by atomic means. This propaganda is of the kind we have come to expect from imperialist historian scum who would justify any war crime perpetrated by the US even an Auschwitz. Goebells and his Nazi propaganda machine would have been proud.

83 posted on 8/4/02 8:24 PM Pacific by rightwing2
 

At least one person on this thread claims to have inside information that refutes the notion that this is revisionism.  I don't know for sure.  I would go easy on the hundreds of thousands of innocent Jap(anese) civilians stuff though.

The Japanese were no observers of human rights.  Their debauchery has been well documented.  Imagine your mom, wife, daughter arrested and forced to serve as whores for the Japanese troops that needed servicing.  What about the Batan Death March?  What about the other attrocities committed across southern Asia?  Where's the handwringing for those folks?

In a climate that saw heavy casualties on both sides, Komakazi pilots willing to die as human bombs, and their sworn intent to fight to the last man, I find it hard to fathom contenancing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our own troops rather than end the war with an atomic weapon.  We dropped two of them and the war ended.

Just because the deaths of our men would have occured to men in the service, what right does that give us to sacrifice their lives in deference to Japanese lives?  I don't particularly relish the idea of wiping out whole cities, but then the alternatives were equally tragic in my estimation.

I do not fault the United States for dropping the bomb.  If one of those US men in uniform serving in the western pacific had been my son or dad, you can bet your ass I'd have been pleased as I could be that they dropped the bomb and spared their needless deaths.

So when it comes to revisionism, I'm afraid your post ranks right up there.

[andy_card]

They had an excellent fighter plane (the Zero),

The Zero was a joke. While superior to anything we had at the outset of the war, it was obscelete by mid-1943. And I suspect that building an atomic bomb is a little bit more complicated than building a prop-fighter. Japan was nowhere even close to building a bomb, and the idea that they were days away from a test is laughable. How did they hide the massive machining plants from the US Occupation Forces? The Gasseous Diffusion equipment?

For God's sakes, they were attempting to power cars from a liquid produced by boiled tree roots, they didn't exactly have the resources to build a reactor, let alone a bomb.

[Southack]

"Oh, come now. Do you not consider the V-1/V-2 weapons, and the first jet aircraft to be significant wartime technologies?"

I consider them to be significant technical feats, but lousy war weapons.

Germany managed to cobble together about 9,500 V-1's. Each V-1 carried less than 2,000 pounds of explosives, and only about 1,500 of those V-1's actually survived their launch, British ack-ack, barage balloons, and allied fighter knockdowns to reach London. V-2's cost far more than the V-1's, and yet they killed even fewer people than did the V-1's.

Substantial technical feats in some ways (both allies and axis had equivilent guidance systems, however), but what did the V-1 offer that couldn't be militarily replicated with an unmanned prop-driven "bomber" (and the V-1 was arguably a superior killing machine to the V-2)?!

The Germans also had a V-3, which was a stage-boosted cannon aimed at London. Again, it was a neat technical feat, but its lack of mobility got it bombed out of existence before it could fire its third shell.

So no, in the technology that counted, the Germans and Japanese were never up to American and English standards. The Axis powers had no working nuclear reactors, did not know how to construct a working atomic bomb, did not have the manufacturing capability to refine U-235 (or Plutonium) in quantity, were using mechanical relays instead of vaccum tubes for their calculating machines, used cryptography methods that were outdated by Great War (i.e. WW1) standards, and were vastly outclassed by American mass production capabilities.

[andy_card]

, used cryptography methods that were outdated by Great War (i.e. WW1) standards

I agree with everything you wrote, except for that last statement. Japanese cryptography was a joke, but was ENIGMA really obsolescent?

[El Gato]

Actually the SgtMaj of the Marine Corps is an E-9. There is no E-10.

Exactly right, my mistake. I need to look more closely at my own sources. SgtMajMC is a separate rank, as are the other two MC E-9s, with the order of rank being, from high to low, SgtMajMC, SgtMaj, and MGySgt. The other services have similiar structures.

[Zathras]

I agree too.
The only thing interesting in "Dark Sun" was how Stalin got the Uranium for their first bomb from us.