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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Was WWII Japan close to developing l
Message-ID: <1161@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Oct-84 13:36:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: dciem.1161
Posted: Thu Oct 25 13:36:42 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Oct-84 14:17:45 EDT
References: <22400024@ea.UUCP>
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 35

================
Towards the end of WWII, the USA, England, Germany & Japan were all working
on A-bomb projects. The US was the only country that made any real progress.
England and Germany were trying to figure out how to get a running reactor
into the air (if you think that's bad, the people on project manhattan had
trouble trying to build a barrel for thin man that met mil. spec., and
could be gotten into the air!). The Japanese may have been the best off
theoretically, but it didn't make any difference - they didn't have the
materials/capability to build a bomb.
================

What sort of baloney is this?  The Manhattan Project was in the USA,
but the workers on it were of several Allied nations.  All English
know-how was provided as the start-up, and many non-American refugees
from the Nazi countries were part of the effort.  The work was done
in N. America (not just USA) because of the reasonable likelihood that
the Germans would overrun Britain in 1940-41, and because there was
in any case less chance of damage from bombing on this side of the
Atlantic.  There never was an independent English effort, until after
the war, when the Fuchs case and general US paranoia led to the raising
of security barriers against continued cooperation.

As for Germany, they may have had reasonable theoretical prospects,
but after the raids on the Norwegian heavy water plants, they didn't
have too much hope of actually making a working reactor with which
to produce the bomb-grade material.  It was certainly a worry, whether
Hitler would produce a bomb first.  As for Japan, this correspondence
is the first I have heard about a Japanese potential for building
an A-bomb. Could be because of European insularity, or because there
never was such a threat.
-- 

Martin Taylor
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