James Rondo Jensen
5つ星のうち5.0
Japan almost beat the US to the Atomic Bomb
2013年5月3日 - (Amazon.com)
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Fifteen years ago I heard that at the end of WW II, the US Navy destroyed 5 cyclotrons in Tokyo by throwing them into the ocean in spite of the protests of a scientist named Nishina. To this day, no one knows who authorized their destruction. I even found a photo on Google of one cyclotron toppling over the edge of a ship in Tokyo Harbor. The story fascinated me because four of my uncles served in the military in the Pacific during the war, also because my dad was a machinist-welder who worked on the Manhattan Project in Hanford, Washington and then on the reconstruction of Pearl Harbor itself. However, on-line searches, the only resource available to me at the time, only produced tantalizing bits of information and photos, e.g. photo of Neils Bohr in Japan in the 1920's with Japanese physicists.
But Robert K. Wilcox has, once more, produced an amazing book that reflects his dogged determination to get to the bottom of an unusual story and write a fascinating book about it. Filing hundreds of FOIA requests, sending letters everywhere he thought he might find information, and interviewing as many people as he could, produced the information that he skilfully put together in this text that reads like a mystery novel.
One of the most surprising parts of the story is the role of Germany in this Japanese project, and the use of their submarines to transport not only uranium, but also samples of novel German armaments, planes, drawings and blue prints. The Tripartite Agreement entered into in the 1930's by Japan, Germany and Italy formed the basis for this sharing of information and materials. It turns out that Japan had a long history of physics research. Einstein even visited Japan in the 1920's.
