Posted on 08/04/2002 3:12:36 PM PDT by 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.
That's what that reactor down by Hog Eye is for, an don ya'll ferget it.
Sgt. Major isn't a Marine rank.
I've heard about this incident. Has it been verified it was a nuclear device? I know the explosion looked like a nuke, but was there radiation?
One of the things the Japanese had done which misled a lot of folks is that they kept the Home Islands fairly empty of heavy industry. Unless a visitor could get into Manchuria and Korea, it is unlikely he would be aware of just how much was going on in that part of the world.
Their atom bomb program was fairly well distributed throughout the areas they controlled on Mainland Asia. One of the questions still remaining from that period is not how far advanced their atom bomb program was - rather, it's how many they had manufactured and where they'd stashed them, and, most of all, are they still there?
In our pursuit of AlQeada you will hear more about this problem.
What does one have to do with the other? They had no petrol because we had pushed them out of that part of the Greater East Asis Co-Prosperity Sphere which had oil, and sank many of their tankers taking oil back to Japan before that point. They have coal, lots of it, but no oil. They also had and have, hydropower, due the mountainous nature of the Islands, and of the Korean penninsula.
We successfully convinced the Japanese that we had both uranium and plutonium bombs, which meant our technological prowess exceeded theirs.
Go back up the thread to my reference to General Stillwell's reconnaisance operation. You don't think I'd refer to that unless I knew something about it -
Thanks a lot for posting this, guy.
I just got shrapnel wounds from my exploding BSometer.
Something very worthwhile to remember, thank you!
Since this stuff is still secret he has never revealed whether it was an atom bomb or a super lightning bolt - it's one of them FUR SHUR!
Still, he would be one of the last remaining evaluators of the evidence left over from the explosion at Harbin in 1945.
Taiwan was occupied by the Japanese for a very long time. It is possible they left their bombs behind on Formosa, and that all we saw was a "test" to see if they still work. Maybe the Israelis could tell us how many Japanese WWII A-bombs they have on hand.
It was a nice clean site too, everything had been leveled as if by a massive explosion.
Don't be so quick to dismiss the folks in that part of the world as lacking ingenuity.
To clarify the record a little bit, they did have a reactor at the end of the war that was within perhaps a factor of two of being critical.
Their studies were aimed primarily at controlled reactions, and were about at the same stage of development as the American program in 1941, when Fermi and associates were making small subcritical piles at Columbia University.
They were taking small steps in the direction of uranium enrichment techniques, but at that late stage of the war, didn't have the resources to do anything much. It was also impossible for them to get significant further supplies of Uranium and heavy water.
And, as far as interviews and available documentation could reveal, they hadn't started on any of the other serious technical challenges regarding the Bomb.
BTW as for the Japanese, they couldn't even get a decent cyclotron running, due to the lack of RF power tubes.
Yes it is.
Hey now, don't be slamming ramen like that. That stuff kept me from starving in college.
We had loads of Tung Oil trees growing around here for similar reasons. Tung Oil
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