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Posted on 04/05/2011 7:20:55 PM PDT by SteveH
Actual Test Was Success
Japan developed and successfully tested an atomic bomb three days prior to the end of the war.
She destroyed unfinished atomic bombs, secret papers and her atomic bomb plans only hours before the advance units of the Russian Army moved into Konan, Korea, site of the project.
Japanese scientists who developed the bomb are now in Moscow, prisoners of the Russians. They were tortured by their captors seeking atomic "know-how."
The Konan area is under rigid Russian control. They permit no American to visit the area. Once, even after the war, an American B-29 Superfortress en route to Konan was shot down by four Russian Yak fighters from nearby Hammung Airfield.
I learned this information from a Japanese officer, who said he was in charge of counter intelligence at the Konan project before the fall of Japan. He gave names, dates, facts and figures on the Japanese atomic project, which I submitted to United States Army Intelligence in Seoul. The War Department is withholding much of the information. To protect the man that told me this story, and at the request of the Army, he is here given a pseudonym, Capt. Tsetusuo Wakabayashi.
The story may throw light on Stalin's recent statement that America will not long have a monopoly on atomic weapons.
(Excerpt) Read more at reformation.org ...
At that time, the US had 30 cyclotrons, Germany had 2, Japan and UK each had 1. That is how dominant the US was in nuclear physics at the time.
Fascinating. I’m thinking I must be the last person to know this.
Also, Okinawa provided some documentation of defense plans for the home islands, to include use of ‘dirty bombs’ on the landing areas, coupled with use of poison gas. Japan planed to accept 30 million casualties to force a million US deaths.
The US still issues purple heart medals minted in preparation for the invasion of Japan. Here is an irony: The dropping of the Nagasaki bomb was probably the single most humanitarian action in the history of the world.
Typical treatment of Korea by the japaneese.
Construct a nuke then test it in Korea rather than somewhere in Japan.
Throughout history Japan has crapped on Korea.
The Japanese nuclear bomb was more along the lines of a subcritical dirty bomb. They had a significant shortage of fissile material.
There was a plant that focused on making biological agents in Japan. It was located with an Army group headquarters at Hiroshima. One way to decontaminate a biological agent is to pass it once through a nuclear fire.
The German research program suffered from Hitler’s perception of it as “Jewish Physics” and so was funded for research, not for production. Heavy water was to be used as a moderator for a nuclear pile-a reactor. Of course we use regular water for many research reactors, the heavy water would have permitted higher activity for less fissile material.
The great barrier was a lack of fissile material. The US reactors that made fissile material initially used carbon as moderator, including the first reactor located in Chicago!!!. Imagine what would have happened if they had a problem like unto Chernobyl, which might have occurred since it was in fact the very first. Dr. Fermi ran a tight ship, comparing predictions to results with a low level of power, acutely aware of the risk.
...but the vast array of equipment and materiel he already had would have been rendered obsolete. When you go to war you have to use what you have.
A book on the subject is currently in the works...
http://www.my-jia.com/The_Flight_of_the_Hog_Wild
I've read that before, way before the internet, but I can't find a source. Do you have one?
I noted that the website is currently offline and that the full title of the book is reputedly “The Flight of the Hog Wild: the Day the World Went Cold.” I wonder if the book takes into consideration that the start of the Cold War is claimed to be earlier by another book concerning U.S. bombers in Russia, “The Poltava Affair”:
http://www.amazon.com/Poltava-Affair-Russian-Warning-American/dp/B00005WO6D
Richard Rhodes tells the story of that December morning in splendid detail.
Fermi, of course, was running the show.
He'd have his workers pull out the damping rods (long wood poles with cadmium IIRC strips, marked in small units of length) one tiny bit at a time. He'd let the neutron detector readings stabilize at their new level, and did a little fiddling with his slide rule; this would tell him how far to withdraw the rods on the next step.
His aim was to withdraw the rods just exactly far enough for the shape of the neutron flux curve to change from an inverse exponential, where the reaction rate would slowly increase to a new stable level, to a straight-line increase without apparent limit.
Going further would turn the exponent positive, which would lead to an ever-accelerating reaction; if unchecked, this would lead to a runaway and meltdown, like Chernobyl (also a carbon-pile reactor, by the way). But of course all he needed to do was to get to the straight-line case, which would demonstrate the sought-for criticality.
Several times during the runup, the instruments would go off-scale, resulting in Fermi's associates stepping them to the next lesser sensitivity. At the beginning, you could hear and see individual clicks and flashes from the Geiger-Müller counters. Eventually, they became a continuous rush, which undoubtely added to the tension of the observers. Except, of course, for Fermi, who knew exactly what he was doing.
When he got the reactor to criticality, demonstrated without any doubt, he ordered it shut down, and that was that. I'm not sure they ever operated that reactor again.
All in a morning's work.
By the way, being the careful experimenter he was, he had assistants standing by with axes at the ropes suspending shutdown rods, and other assistants standing atop the pile (Fermi coined this usage of the word) with buckets of IIRC barium solution to dump into the assembly in case things went wrong with both the reactor and the automatic shutdown safety devices. If they had to do the latter, the pile would be permanently ruined.
I don't know what power level they let the reactor run up to, but I think it was under a watt. If they had let the reaction continue to increase, it would have gone to many megawatts before igniting the carbon blocks and creating the aforementioned Chernobyl, before its time. If they had "pulled out all the stops," it would have gone exponential and likely have created an explosion. Not a true fission bomb, but a sort of dirty bomb--in the middle of Chicago's Hyde Park; and the former site of the World's Columbian Exposition would have become the site of the "World's Columbian Explosion".
After the war, the government founded the Argonne National Lab as their principal nuclear reactor research facility, southwest of Chicago, in a rather less populated area.
Fermi was the rarest of physicists: A recognized genius in both theory and experiment. Like Johnny von Neumann, his would be a life cut short by cancer.
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The downing of the B-29 called the Hog Wild on August 29, 1945 was the last of a long string of incidents. In each case, the B-29 was seized and the crew interned. And then, only after long and hard negotiations between the Soviets and the Americans, they were eventually released.
Since its inception, design, development, production and deployment, the B-29 “Superfortress” was kept secret from the Russians. Once the new bomber was used, of course, it was no longer a secret. However, even then, not a single B-29 was delivered to the Soviet Union through Lend-Lease, and no Russian pilots was allowed to fly aboard a B-29 during combat or training missions.
David Snell’s Atlanta Constitution article (above) on Oct. 3, 1946, not Oct. 1 - mentions the downing of the Hog Wild, but not by name.
Numerous explanations are given for the downing of an American B-29 bomber by Soviet Yak fighters (including David Snell’s). Each explanation is explored in The Flight of the Hog Wild at http://www.my-jia.com/Flight_of_the_Hog_Wild/index.htm
[The site was temporarily down during a change of “hosts.” It should be up now.]
The Russians gave several contradictory explanations for the downing of the Hog Wild, and David Snell - a future Senior Editor of LIFE Magazine - gave another, namely, The Russians were concerned the American crew might spot a rumored Japanese nuclear facility in the city of Konan (now Hungnam, North Korea).
The Flight of the Hog Wild addresses all of these issues, including David Snell, Japan’s WWII atomic bomb program, American intelligence, Russian “spies,” and the start of the Soviet atomic bomb program.
Japan’s nuclear facility is discussed in Robert K. Wilcox’s book, Japan’s Secret War, but it’s only the tip of iceberg. Wilcox’s mistake was defending the Japanese counter-intelligence officer’s claim that an atomic test took place off the coast of Konan on August 12, 1945. The Flight of the Hog Wild is an in-depth, well-documented discussion of Japan’s war-time atomic program, but it does not repeat Wilcox’s error.
Although the U.S. Army confirmed that some sort of explosion took place, just as Snell claimed, there is no evidence that it was an atomic explosion... Japan’s atomic program in Konan is another story.
Over 250 scholars, journalists, authors, scientists and eye witnesses from five countries (including Japan and Russia) were interviewed in order to tell the story fully and accurately.
In my mind, just because an incident involves the United States and the Soviet Union, does not necessarily make it a Cold War incident. Consider the two most famous Cold War incidents: the 1960 Gary Powers U-2 shoot down and the Cuban Missile Crisis. What do they have in common? They both involve nuclear weapons and they both created international incident.
It is for that reason I believe the downing of the Hog Wild is the first “true” Cold War incident.
BTT!
Yeah ok, whatever. But check this out:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/
Principles of distributive justice are normative principles designed to guide the allocation of the benefits and burdens of economic activity. After outlining the scope of this entry and the role of distributive principles, the first relatively simple principle of distributive justice examined is strict egalitarianism, which advocates the allocation of equal material goods to all members of society.
[But hey, this is very OT...and by all means do not let me get in the way of your belief that the Pope is infallible, even if he writes in such a manner as to preclude logic from applying...]
Yeah, the first they choose to examine, because it’s the simplest.
Since the Catholic Church, in the same document stressed that the state cannot confiscate personal property for what it deems to be a superior purpose, and that in fact, private property and profitable use of property are fundamental rights, it’s should be obvious that’s not the meaning the Church has. In fact, you’re judging a 19th-century word usage by the connotations set forth more than a century of social perversion later.
The same Stanford essay does explicitly include non-material distribution, such as of justice (the original meaning) and opportunity, both of which I would say any true believer in free markets (as opposed to plutocracy and fascism, as well as socialism) would concur with.
I’ve only skimmed it so far (I will read it more thoroughly when i get the chance), but I’m guessing that the Stanford article finds the definition of “distributive justice” to be drifting at least as certainly as the meaning of “social justice” has drifted.
(In that vein, one of the key cardinals of the curia — I forget which — has been pushing the fact that Vatican needs to get with the fact that too many societies understand “social justice” to mean “economic redistribution,” “socialist” or other materialistic concerns which are entire alien to what the Vatican is usually talking about when it refers to “social justice.” To the American Religious Left, social justice means that those who refuse to work, or make horrendous choices should be spared the economic consequences of their actions, which actually would be injustice, whereas the Vatican is usually referring to respect for life, combatting corruption, the even application of the rule of law, and, yes, just compensation.)
Now I’m going to read this Stanford document more carefully... I’ll update this if I find anything which significantly changes my assertion...
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