pdf - WHALE

and Heisenberg's knowledge - or lack of it - in particular.
Matters are not helped by events on the other side of the world
in the Pacific theater, for there American investigators would
uncover similarly strange goings on after the war ended.
There, after Nagasaki, the Emperor Hirohito, overriding his
ministers who wanted to continue the war, decided that Japan
would surrender unconditionally. But why would Hirohito's
ministers urge continuance of the war in the face of overwhelming
Allied conventional arms superiority, and, from their point of view,
facing a potential rain of atomic bombs After all, "two" bombs
could just as easily have turned into twenty. One could, of course,
attribute the ministers' objections to the Emperor's intentions to
"proud samurai traditions" and the Japanese sense of "honor" and
so on. And that would indeed be a plausible explanation.
But another explanation is that Hirohito's cabinet ministers
knew something.
What his ministers probably knew was what American
intelligence would soon discover: that the Japanese, "just prior to
their surrender, had developed and successfully test fired an atomic
bomb. The project had been housed in or near Konan(Japanese
name for Hungnam), Korea, in the peninsula's North." 16 It was
exploded, so the story goes, one day after the American plutonium
bomb, "Fat Man", exploded over Nagasaki, i.e., on August 10,
1945. The war, in other words, depending on Hirohito's decision,
could have "gone nuclear". By that time, of course it would have
done Japan no good to prolong it, with no viable means of delivery
of an atomic weapon to any worthwhile strategic American targets.
The Emperor stood his ministers down. 17
These allegations constitute yet another difficulty for the Allied
Legend, for where did Japan obtain the necessary uranium for its
(alleged) A-bomb And more importantly, the technology to enrich
16 Robert K. Wilcox, Japan's Secret War, p. 15.
17 The Japanese were, in fact, developing large cargo submarines to
transport a bomb to West Coast American port cities to be detonated there,
much like Einstein warned in his famous letter to President Roosevelt that
initiated the Manhattan Project. Of course, Einstein was more worried about
the Germans using such a method of ship-born delivery, than the Japanese.
14