[Jia]

Months before the end of WWII, a Japanese engineer (who had been working at Dr. Nishina's a atomic bomb facility in Tokyo) was captured in Manchuria, and imprisoned in Chungking, China. How and when he was captured is unknown, but he was interrogated by an Army intelligence officer at Sino Translation and Interrogation Center in Chungking.

Most suspicious of all is why he was in China in the first place. Yes, Japan controlled much of Manchuria at the time, but why did he travel to China when there was so much important work to be completed in Tokyo?

Was he part of the mission to arrange with China for the peaceful end to the war, or was there for a more sinister purpose: Since he was part of a team of nuclear/atomic phyicists and chemists -- who were attempting to build the world's first atomic bomb -- perhaps he was on his way to (or returning from) a meeting with the Chinese (of somee faction) for the purpose of forming an alliance against the Allies. He understood how to build an atomic bomb, and what it was capable of. Was he there to make the Chinese an offer they couldn't refuse? namely, join Japan against the Allies and you can use our new weapon: the genshi bakudan, the Japanese atomic bomb. (which, by the way, was nowhere near completion)

The attached illustration (translated into English) was discovered in a Tokyo laboratory after war. It shows the steps required to enrich uranium for use in an atomic bomb. If you have any information about his trip to China, or want to speculate what a Japanese atomic engineer was doing in China in 1945, post a response.

A book on this topic is here >> http://www.my-jia.co...of_the_Hog_Wild

Attached File(s)

•  uranium_enrichment_DO_NOT_REPRODUCE.jpg (25.56K)
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[xiaogezhi]

wa, unbealiable

[William O'Chee]

This is very interesting, but I can't see much evidence for this other than supposition.

The diagram, so far as I can see, is an attempt to enrich uranium by heating the U3O8. Leaving aside the fact that simply having a diagram doesn't mean you have built the process, thermal diffusion will not give you sufficiently enriched uranium to build a weapon. To build a nuclear weapon you need highly enriched uranium. Heat diffusion will give you a very low grade of enrichment, of between 3% and 5% U235. That would be sufficient to run through a reactor, but not to make a weapon. Top put it into perspective the bomb dropped on Hiroshima used 80% U235. You would need to run the UF6 through another process, such as electromagnetic isotope separation, to get highly enriched material.

A further guide to how difficult this is can be seen by the efforts Iran is going to to try to achieve their own nuclear weapon. Iran has the benefit of 40 years of nuclear science since the Second World War (including the use of centrifuges to enrich the uranium) but they have been at this for years, and are still a long way off from getting enough fissionable material to do a test explosion. Weaponising this is a further complication.

There is also no evidence that Japan had access to sufficient uranium, since they had to request the Germans send them uranium. Before you can even start discussing making enriched uranium, you need to first show where Japan was able to obtain enough uranium to begin enrichment. That too, is not explained.

[haidao]

I did read once that the Japanese were developing atomic weapons in a base in what is today Konan in North Korea. They say the Japanese even tested an atomic weapon.

Quote

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.

Got the above from this site: http://www.ww2incolo...read.php?t=8811

[William O'Chee]

haidao, on 08 October 2009 - 02:08 PM, said:

I did read once that the Japanese were developing atomic weapons in a base in what is today Konan in North Korea. They say the Japanese even tested an atomic weapon.



Got the above from this site: http://www.ww2incolo...read.php?t=8811

The thread above is based on exactly the same source as the one quoted by Jia. That source is a journalist who was previously a US Army officer by the name of Snell. Snell's story is, however, uncorroborated and entirely speculative. I'm afraid that just because someone writes a book about something doesn't make it so.

The problem with the Snell story is that it cannot answer any of the issues I mentioned in my previous post. There is no evidence of sufficient enrichment capacity to produce weapons grade uranium; no evidence of sufficient supply of U3O8 to produce that enriched uranium; and no actual evidence that a test took place.

In fact, the evidence is quite to the contrary. The Japanese were so lacking in U3O8 that they asked the Germans to send them some in a submarine, and that submarine surrendered to the Allies before it reached Japan.

Moreover, one would expect that actual evidence of some secret programme in Korea would have become known, as was the case with their biological and chemical weapons tests. Of course conspiracy theorists will claim that this evidence was covered up by the Russians and Americans. But why? If the Russians had acquired a device which had been tested, then they would have been only too happy to let the West know about it. After all, consider the tensions at Yalta. Moreover, if this had occurred, it would have taken them a lot less time than it did to build and deploy their own nuclear bomb.

This post has been edited by William O'Chee: 09 October 2009 - 06:33 AM

[Yizheng]

William O, on 09 October 2009 - 06:32 AM, said:

If the Russians had acquired a device which had been tested, then they would have been only too happy to let the West know about it. After all, consider the tensions at Yalta. Moreover, if this had occurred, it would have taken them a lot less time than it did to build and deploy their own nuclear bomb.

Good point. The Russians took whatever they could of use to them out of Manchuria when their troops entered in 1945, and North Korea was quickly under their control too. They were already very actively pursuing their atomic programme, or rather atomic spying programme, as it mostly was then. If the Japanese had really reached some kind of advanced level of nuclear weapon development, the Russians would certainly have used that work. As it is, there is a lot of information now available on how exactly the Russians acquired their nuclear knowledge, and people who were involved in that work have written memoirs etc too. Really, they got their knowledge via their spies in America.

Of course, work was going on elsewhere on nuclear weapons, but even America could do it only with all the best conditions - uranium supply, and the collected brains of a whole international team of scientists. Japan just didn;t have the conditions to achieve it, and like William O'Chee correctly notes, you need high enriched uranium to make a bomb, and rather a lot of it. The Iran analogy is a good one, because they have indeed been working on a nuclear enrichment programme longer than the Japanese would have been, and with much more advanced technology, but even with the discovery of their second enrichment centre, they still do not yet have the centrifuge capacity to get enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb.

It's atually a really difficult undertaking to make a nuclear weapon, fortunately. I just don't see any realistic way the Japanese could have done it.
Plus, if the Russians had in fact discovered evidence of nuclear weapon development, talk of this would surely have seeped out by now here, but I have never seen allegation of this. I have seen allegations that the Americans took Unit 731 biological warfare specialists to America and made use of their skills, not to mention that they also took all the Unit 731 experiment records and data, for their own use (saved them from having to do such experiments themselves). Im sure that if Russia had done something similar with Japanese nuclear experiments, it would be known by now, and I am far from knowing everything here, of course, but I've read a lot about nuclear weapons and I've never seen evidence of this Japanese bomb.

[William O'Chee]

My apologies, Yizheng. I should have remembered you are in Russia, and have a lot more access to the Russian stuff than most of us do.