Please prove this as I watched a similar program on the History Channel that stated that the Japanese were close to making a Bomb at the end of WWII but had never actually put one together. This show included some of the surviving Japanese scientists who worked on the project. The Project was based in North Korea.
Japan's WWII A-bomb Project in Hungnam, N Korea
Most historians agree that Japan had worked on 'nuclear' projects during WWII. The thing which may be new is the reputed Japanese nuke lab in N Korea. North Korea has hinted that its nuclear program began in the 1950s, presumably based on the Japanese nuke program at Hungnam. If you have info or comments on this subject, please contact editor - THANKS.
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Japan's own efforts to build a bomb are difficult for many here to accept because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the widespread feeling that Japan would never have even considered such a brutal attack. Japan Times 7 March 2003.
Slowly but surely, the truth about the Japanese atomic bomb projects in WWII is coming to the surface. But just as surely, the Japanese continue to try and spin doctor their way out of owning up to reality and responsibility. The latest disingenuous Japanese attempt at "setting the record straight", is from the Japan Times English language online newspaper, dated 7 March 2003.
There are three features of this article that stand out. First is the admission that, far from being innocent nuclear victims, the Japanese themselves were trying to build a uranium fission bomb with a yield of at least 20,000 tons of TNT. This would have made it about 25 % larger than America's "Little Boy" uranium bomb that hit Hiroshima. (Best estimate of that device's explosive yield was 12-15 KT.)
Having finally come clean about this fact, however, the Japanese immediately try to downplay the progress they made. This is the second point that stands out: In a very subtle move, the Japan Times article tries to suggest that the Japanese scientists were on the "slow neutron reaction" track, although they don't come right out and say it in so many words. While it is possible that they were in fact doing slow neutron reaction research, if they were, it was in parallel with their fast neutron reaction bomb research---the same thing the Americans were doing. (The US Navy had a small, almost forgotten WWII research program into the slow neutron reaction, which would later bear fruit, along with other work, in the production of reactors for powering ships and submarines.)
Remember that Yoshio Nishina, the lead scientist of the Imperial Japanese Army's Riken Institute atomic bomb project, did understand the fast neutron reaction very well. He had published scholarly papers on the subject prior to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and he was also able to extrapolate a number of highly classified facts about Little Boy using nothing more than empirical observation and a slide rule. (For example, he was able to calculate to a high degree of accuracy both the actual number of neutrons that fissioned in Little Boy's core, and the force of the blast.) Given these truths, how likely is it that Japanese science in WWII was "nowhere close to a bomb"?
The BBC article on which this thread is based quotes "experts" who have studied the Riken Institute / Nishina warhead design and pronounced it "not very powerful". I'd like to know what that means---"only" 2 kilotons? 5? 10?---but rest assured, if the Japanese warhead really was relatively weak, it was not because Japanese science didn't understand how to produce a supercritical chain reaction detonation. No way. It was because the engineering of the compression of the two sub-critical masses was lacking. (Couldn't ram the two pieces of the warhead core together fast enough.) A technical mechanical engineering problem like this is a totally different problem than a lack of understanding of bomb physics, which is what they're trying to say now.
It also strikes me as unlikely that Nishina would make the calculation error that the article says the blueprints show he did make. Supposedly, Nishina thought that the warhead would go off if the two subcritical warhead components were compressed in 1/20th to 1/30th of a second, and not the 1/200th to 1/300th of a second that was truly necessary. I wonder how likely it is that the world class physicist Nishina would forget to carry the ten. But even if he did make such an error in 1943 (when the Kuroda documents apparently were written), the Japanese warhead design would still have worked even at the slower compression speed had it had sufficient highly enriched uranium. And this is leaving aside any later research under Nishina at Riken and Bunsaku Arakatsu at Hungnam, Korea, for which there is currently little or no existing Japanese documentary evidence.
(But we know it did happen. I would really like to see a bomb physicist do a calculation of the explosive force of a fission bomb with a slower compression speed, so we would know once and for all what kind of yield the Japanese weapon would actually have had---again, assuming they did not do any further refinement of their warhead design after 1943, an unlikely proposition, it seems to me. Unless the Nishina interview took place in 1943 and the warhead design was done later; the Japan Times article does not specify this.)
The third point is that the article implies---not so subtly---that anyone who thinks there might be more to the story of Japanese bomb making efforts at Hungnam is basically a right wing whacko and/or believes in little green men. Robert Wilcox's book Japan's Secret War does a great job of documenting the many suspicions of late WWII and Occupation US intelligence that something big was going on. Wilcox cites a number of original OSS and G-2 documents that he had to pry out of the Suitland, MD archives using the Freedom of Information Act. It is also a fact, contrary to the Japan Times article, that American intelligence was never able to penetrate Hungnam in any effective or comprehensive way. A B-29 that may or may not have been snooping around in the fall of 1945 was shot down by Russian Yak fighters when it came too close.
We also know that the Russians got a lot of heavy water from the gargantuan Hungnam military industrial complex after the War, and that they captured a number of high ranking Japanese atomic scientists working there who were later ruthlessly tortured for information. It is a fact that Soviet intelligence was the best in the world during WWII. It even managed to penetrate the Manhattan Project, and there were at least two moles working for the Soviets in the American atomic programs. Atomic espionage was one of Moscow's highest wartime priorities, and obviously the Russians thought there was a lot to be gained from the Japanese scientists whom they captured in Korea, but we are to believe nothing was going on there? Uncle Josef Stalin may have been many things, but he was nothing if not a ruthless pragmatist. I have long suspected that the biggest reason the Russians jumped into the Pacific War at the very end was to get their hands on Japanese atomic research at Hungnam.
The bottom line is that initially, the official Japanese and American mantra was, "Well, yeah, the Japanese had a few bright guys, but their overall science was poor and they were nowhere close to atomic weapons."
Then, after Deborah Shapley's 1978 Science magazine article started to expose them, it was "Well, yeah, they did a little preliminary work in the field, but they were nowhere close to a bomb."
Now, after Wilcox, the FAS assessment, and the BBC article, it's, "Yeah, they did some work and even produced a warhead design, but they were nowhere close to a bomb and certainly would never have done the unthinkable and actually used it, as those evil Americans did." The Pellas Institute
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Japan's Secret War- Japan's Race Against Time. Wilcox's book explains not only how essential it was to finish WWII as soon as humanly possible, it ties up some loose ends. Why did Russia make a beeline to Hungnam when it entered the war, and why was it so antsy to start the invasion? Why was our country so sure that Orientals wouldn't ever develop the bomb? And for those who doubt that Japan would have used it, read the definitive, massive, but eminently readable Japan's Imperial Conspiracy by Bergamini.
Japanese Atomic Program (PhysicsToday) -- The Japanese atomic program was a program by the Empire of Japan to develop a genzai bakudan, an atomic bomb during World War II. The program started around the same time as the U.S. Manhattan Project. Most experts believe that the program was small, and managed neither to refine enough uranium-235 nor to breed enough plutonium needed to make a workable device, although there are indications that Japan had a more sizable program than is commonly understood. One isolated and disputed report even claims that an atomic bomb was tested and detonated on August 12, 1945 near Hungnam, North Korea, shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In any case, the surrender of Japan three days later on August 15 halted all developments before Japan could finish developing the weapon.
Japan's Nuclear Weapons Program (FAS) -- There are indications that Japan had a more sizable program than is commonly understood, and that there was close cooperation among the Axis powers, including a secretive exchange of war materiel. The German submarine U-234, which surrendered to US forces in May 1945, was found to be carrying 560 kilograms of Uranium oxide destined for Japan's own atomic program. The oxide contained about 3.5 kilograms of the isotope U-235, which would have been about a fifth of the total U-235 needed to make one bomb. After Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, the occupying US Army found five Japanese cyclotrons, which could be used to separate fissionable material from ordinary uranium. The Americans smashed the cyclotrons and dumped them into Tokyo Harbor.
Bombardment of Tokyo's Nuclear Labs (AU AF) -- Japan's scientific community was aware of the explosive possibilities of an uranium bomb. During World War II, the Japanese Army funded one nuclear research project in Tokyo and the Japanese Navy started two other such projects.
WARTIME DOCUMENTS SET RECORD STRAIGHT -- Japan's A-bomb goal still long way off in '45 (JapanTimes) -- The night the American B-29 warplanes came, Ryohei Nakane had been enriching uranium for Japan's "super bomb." By the next morning -- April 13, 1945 -- all that remained of his samples and his laboratory at Riken Institute was charred, splintered wood and broken glass
New evidence tracks Japan's efforts to create atomic bomb (Viking) -- Japan was working on its own atomic bomb when the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Also in 1945, Nazi Germany was shipping uranium oxide to Japan by submarine, escorted by two Japanese officers. This article from the San Diego Union-Tribune shines new light on these historicals facts, which are not widely known.
Japan's A-bomb There has been speculation for many years that Japan was working on the A-Bomb. An article appeared in World War II Magazine (July 1995) by Al Hemingway that indicates indeed, that Japan may have exploded an atomic bomb on a tiny islet in the Sea of Japan on August 12, 1945. (konan = Hungnam) This is basically regurgitation of Wilcox's claim.
Japanese physicists (AIP) -- A number of Japanese physicists made significant contributions to physics during the twentieth century. Until very recently, however, Western historians have not fully appreciated how Japanese physicists fostered the development of physics as a science. One reflection of the Western view of Japanese physicists as "outsiders" is the fact that not a single biography of a Japanese physicist (except a few translations from Japanese) has been published in the English language. Nishina Yoshio
German A-bomb Over the years, there has been a good deal of speculation on the German's atomic program of W.W.II. By putting together information from a number of reliable sources (listed at the end of the article), I have endeavored to give a brief overview of the project, as well as a cutaway drawing of what the finished weapon may have been like, and how it may have been delivered.
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Here is another source that mentions the Aug 12 date
19450812 (Sun.) [U] Japan's Atomic Bomb, Leon Thompson (Reprinted with permission of Military magazine, 2122 28th St., Sacramento, CA 95818. A sample copy of Military may be obtained by writing to the above address)
While reading the article by William B. Breuer entitled "Hiroshima bomb saved lives" (Oct. '94, pg. 39), I had to chuckle to myself, because he is on the right track, but doesn't know the half of it; the bomb saved two nations! I was a Medic Surgical-Medical Technician from 1947-49 in the 237th Med. Disp. where we headquartered in the Meiji Building on Avenue A in downtown Tokyo, Japan and we took "cell slides" from victims of the Hiroshima bomb. I saw mutated vegetables grown in contaminated soil after the bomb and flew over Hiroshima two years after the bomb — it still looked like a garbage dump. I saw the Navy ships used in the atoll tests when I was in Hawaii on my way home in 1949. . . but the best was yet to come.
One hot summer day in the park outside Japan's Imperial Palace, I met up with Mr. Papps, an OSS Officer. His office was just a few yards down the hallway from Gen. MacArthur's office and he invited me to see his office. As I walked into his office, I saw three top American atomic scientists going over a large diagram of some kind of device. I asked Mr. Papps what it was and he said it was the actual diagram of the Japanese atomic bomb. I asked him if it was workable. He said, "Yes." It was just like ours and very workable. He also showed me some Japanese orders to use the bomb on the Allies when they came into Japanese waters; how they would do this was not explained.
From what I could tell, a German transport submarine No. 234 was on its way to Japan with plutonium to make the bomb more powerful. It was supposed to dock at Hiroshima, but I later learned that the submarine gave up to the Americans in the Atlantic — Portsmouth, NH — so they never received the plutonium, but they did have enough uranium for one bomb and were ready to use it. We dropped our bomb first. Had we waited two weeks, the Japanese atomic bomb would have been used on our Allied fleet, and this was one of the reasons they kept dragging their feet to give up. When it became known that a third bomb would be dropped on Tokyo, they began to talk peace.
I hope that William Breuer will find the papers I saw at the OSS office because it tells a bigger story. It was really a shock to our atomic scientists to learn that the Japanese had nearly beaten us to the draw, and this is one of the reasons they would not let the story be told. We nearly lost it all, and two weeks made a big difference. I know because I personally saw the actual diagrams to the Japanese atomic bomb and they did intend to use it on us first.
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From: Keith B. Rosenberg
Date: 9 Nov 1996 22:24:06 -0500; Posted to Newsgroups: soc.history.war.world-war-ii
John Greenland wrote:
I was interested in Japan's attempt to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. Whereas "Japan's Secret War" claims that Japan managed to test a bomb towards the end of the war, I have heard and seen a number of sources suggesting that it was impossible for Japan to produce a bomb. Does anyone know how successful Japan's nuclear weapons program was or where I could find good sources on this topic?
Richard Rhodes "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" has information on the Japanese Atomic Bomb project. The Japanese never got beyond the Lab. They had a cyclotron (low powered because of a lack of electronic tubes) and were experimenting with separating U235 from U238. Even that activity came to a halt later in the war as resources became unavailable. Rhodes also says that the Japanese came to the conclusion that the United States did not have the spare capacity to make nuclear weapons either.
There are flaws in the argument that Japan actually tested a nuclear weapon:
The first is that it is unlikely that the Japanese would have surrendered if they had nuclear weaponry also. A second thing to consider is that the United States Government would not have hidden a Japanese bomb test once Japan had started getting people to think of the Japanese as the innocent victims of U.S. nuclear weaponry. Third is the facilities needed to make nuclear weaponry are not small and they would have left a lasting mark on the environment which could not be erased by a mere 50 years. Radioactive isotopes would still be detectable and provide proof and approximate dates. A last thing is that the nuclear explosion on or near land would still be detectable. The Trinity site is still radioactive despite being cleaned up. I have not read the book, but if I remember from a review the test supposedly took place in North Korea which is convenient because of a lack of access to the site.
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Sun Wu Kong
Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race With Time to Build its own Atomic Bomb, Robert WIlcox, 1985, William Morrow and Company, New York, New York ISBBN 0-688-04188-4
Nuclear Weapons History: Japan's Wartime Bomb Projects Revealed, Deborah Shapley, 1978, Science
Lee Fleming Reese, M.A. Japan's A-Bomb, Military, Vol. V, No. 3 August, 1988, p, 22.
11/21/96 - I believe Wilcox wrote a book about Japan's secret weapon or some similar title. I've also seen a photo of the Japanese cyclotron being dumped into the ocean after the war. Wilcox indicated that there were two nuclear programs by the Japanese, one by the army and another by the navy. The navy program made better progress and was moved to Hamhung.
Wilcox surmises that the Japanese may have even conducted a test of a weapon on a small island. It may be possible to determine which island with some sort of radiation meter?? I'm interested in any more info on this. Some of the people I have talked t o indicate that the story smells like propaganda designed to justify the use of nuclear weapons against Japan.
I think the Japanese called the project Fu or Fugo which may have been linked to the balloon bombing of America in which they use paper and rubberized silk balloons to drop explosive and incendiary bombs on the US. There was even some talk of using such devices to spread plague (or other chemical or biological agents) in the US. The Japanese apparently used such weapons against Chinese populations.
The Japanese also discussed using the balloons to infiltrate saboteurs and intelligence agents into the US. The modern understanding of just how the troposphere winds work (jet stream, etc.) was greatly advanced by these balloon operations and after the war the US used similar balloons (using improved materials) to carry cameras over the USSR.
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Pyongyang, August 24 (KCNA) -- It has been brought to light that Japan conducted an atomic bomb device test at a chemical plant in Hungnam, Korea towards the end of World War II. Rodong-sinmun today says that people clearly should know that Japan 's nuclear ambition is deeply rooted and its nuclear armament has a long history. The analyst continues:
"Japan is trying to realize the nuclear ambition it could not during the World War II. The Japanese reactionaries intend to equip Japan with nuclear arms and make Japan a nuclear superpower, dominate Asia by dint of strength and extend their military influence all over the world.
The ruling quarters of Japan advertise 'the non-nuclear principle' and behave as if they had nothing to do with nuclear issue, but nobody is taken in. Though they call for 'checking the nuclear development' of someone and 'ban on nuclear tests', this is a trick to conceal their historically rooted nuclear armament. They must stop their criminal moves for nuclear armament and nuclear power building, mindful of the grave consequences of these moves.
Old Japanese army tests A-bomb in sea off Korea
Pyongyang, August 8 (KCNA) -- The Japanese Tokyo Shimbun August 6 disclosed that the old Japanese army tested an A-bomb in the sea off Hungnam on the east coast of Korea just before the end of World War II.
According to a secret document of the U.S. Army quoting the Jiji news from the U.S. National Archives, the U.S. Army was informed of the fact that a test related to the atomic power took place at a chemical factory in Hungnam in 1945 and ordered investigation into it. It also said in an investigation report worked out on January 16, 1947, that the Japanese army made an explosion test with the help of a boat in waters off the east coast of the North Korea, the result of which was like an A-bomb.
The U.S. forces received information from an intelligence officer of the old Japanese army that it tested an A-bomb in waters 30 km away from Hungnam at the dawn of August 12, 1945, and huge mushroom-like clouds rose at that time. Tokyo Shimbun said that Japan began an A-bomb research in secrecy on the order of the army headquarters from about 1940.
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From a reader - 11/17/96: It was reported last year in Japanese newspapers that Japan had nuclear weapons laboratories but that they were frequently bombed by the U.S., so Japan moved the labs to Korea.
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A reader's inquiry:
Would you care to comment on rumors that during World War II Japan experimented with the A bomb in North Korea. There are other rumors that Japan exploded an A bomb days before the war ended. The story goes that after the surrender Russia not only hauled Japanese A bomb equipment from North Korea to Russia but also took Japanese nuclear experts with them as well.