Japan Developed & Detonated an A-bomb ????

Anyone catch last nights program on the History channel dealing with Japan's A-bomb program. There are claims that Japan successfully detonated an A-Bomb on Aug 12th, 1945 in North Korea.

[ 17. August 2005, 04:19 PM: Message edited by: esoxlee ]

 

I did not catch that, nor have I ever heard anything even as much as a rumor. I will google and keep wathcing this posting.

 

Okay, GOOGLE is such a wonderful thing. This is the most interesting of the sites that I found. Looks like Japan may have been further along than the Germans.

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.japan/msg/f74d207859a1a0f3?q=author:tarrant%40vikingphoenix.com&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d&rnum=3

 

Here's a link suggesting the Japanese did indeed detonate a nuclear device.

http://39th.org/39th/hc/hc_japan_a_bomb.html

Link for History Channel's TV program description:

http://store.aetv.com/html/product/index.jhtml?id=74425

(not trying to promote the video, couldn't find the program description any where else)

[ 17. August 2005, 02:44 PM: Message edited by: esoxlee ]

 

Outstanding information. Some of the links I followed yesterday didn't support the theory, but when things are highly classified it is hard to prove afterward. What they would have done with this weapon if the war had lasted longer sounds like a good question for the "What If" forum.

 

The Japs would have had to do very little to be ahead of the Germans in building an atomic bomb. That's because the German bomb never got off square one, it being the subject of passive sabotage by several German atomic scientists, most prominent of whom was the head of the whole project, Werner Heisenberg.

 

What you are saying is that the calculational error that made the Germans abandon the atomic weapon program they began was deliberate? This is another new piece of information. Where did you find it?

 

German atomic scientists downplayed the bomb for personal reasons, warning each other that "if word of the possibilities of a "uranium bomb" ever reached the Fuhrer ... they might expect to spend the rest of the war behind barbed wire until they had made such a bomb". pp 129, "The German Atomic Bomb", 1967, Simon and Schuster, also see "Heisenberg's War", Knopf, 1993, and for an exciting first person account of the capture of Werner Heisenberg, see pp 230, "The Alsos Mission" Award House, 1967

 

Oh! Another word about a Jap atomic bomb. Unlike the German atomic effort, which went for atomic power first (for ships and subs), the Jap effort (around Yoshio Nishina) went straight for the bomb. So the interesting thing here is not that the Japs failed, but that they tried to succeed. Having a bomb as their goal then makes null and void that constant and most annoying Jap claim, on moral and ethical grounds, that America was immoral in developing such a terrible weapon and the Japs were just innocent bystanders, conducting warfare like gentlemen.

 

Conducting warfare like Japanese gentlemen, meaning that like the Germans, everyone who was not like them was inferior and unworthy of any respect. One of the other threads has a link to a story about a Japanese officer and his treatment by the Chinese after the war. It was interesting that he reflected enough during his captivity. He realized that he was being treated the way that he should have treated others during their captivity under his control.

 

To make an atom bomb you need a working nuclear reactor in order to obtain the nuclear material needed to make a bomb. The Japanese didn't have a working reactor....So no bomb!!!

 

I am sorry to disagree with you redcoat, but as a worker in the nuclear industry I know that it is possible to enrich uranium without a reactor. The program talked about the Japanese progress and a little about the German progress with enrichment technology. If you want to make a bomb using Plutonium you need a reactor but weapons grade uranium is possible without it.

 

Correct me if I am wrong Bigice, but at this time uranium enrichment required the use of a centrifuge, a gaseous diffusion plant, or an electromagnetic seperation plant. Even the US was abandoning the centrifuge technique by the end of the war because frankly it couldn't produce enriched uranium fast enough. The US went to a gasoues diffusion plant (the K-25 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee) and the electromagnetic separation plant in Clinton, Tennessee. It turned out that the Manhattan Project used a combination of these methods in order to produce enough enriched uranium for the one bomb that they did have by July '45. By all accounts the gaseous diffusion plant that the Japanese did have was destoyed in '45 by a B-29 raid. This plant was much smaller than the K-25 plant. It had been reported in papers by a Japanese scientist that worked with Dr. Nishina (the top Japanese scientist at the time) that they believed they could achieve a detonation with a chain reaction occuring in 1/20th to 1/30th of a second. The US bombs were having to do this within 1/200th of a second. Finally, Dr. Nishina believed he could achieve this detonation with just over 2 pounds of enriched uranium whereas the US bomb was using 66lbs for an approximate 15-20 kton detonation. Does any of this prove that the Japanese had not conducted a test detonation off Korea at the end of the war? No, but the evidence does seem to indicate that it is very unlikely that had they tried, such a test would not have achieved a full nuclear detonation, maybe more on the order a conventional explosion with the effects of a dirty bomb spreading radioactive material.

 

I think that everything that you have said is correct Bill. If I remember one of the articles I read correctly the Japanese had used gaseous diffusion plants. I was amazed by the information that they had even pursued the possibility of making a nuke. I wonder if the average person on the street in Japan knows this?

Congrats on the new medal Bill. Looks nice.

 

Thanks much Bigice, I can't say for sure since the few people that I talked to when I was in Japan in '95 were sailors of the JSDF. Those that I was able to talk with had some knowledge that of what Japan had been doing but as for the "average Joe", somehow I get the impression that it isn't too widely known.