Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [43]
Insofar as the Japanese state took notice of the atomic bomb, it made little effort to mobilize scientists into a cohesive unit to work on it. Here was the third and most important obstacle that stood in the way of a successful program. The military, which held predominant influence in the government, was interested in obtaining any weapon that might prove decisive against the Americans, particularly after confidence waned following the Japanese naval defeat at Midway in June 1942. But the military’s effort on this score was hampered (again) by scientists’ skepticism that a bomb was a practical possibility, the prospect of other winning weapons—rockets, so-called ‘death rays,’ and suicide planes or torpedoes— competing with nuclear weapons for budgetary favor, and above all a lack of coordinated thinking by the military branches that might have set the priorities for scientific projects and directed funds to those that seemed most likely to succeed in the shortest possible time. That the Japanese state during the Pacific War was authoritarian did not mean that its scientific and technological planning was fully coordinated. Japan’s pursuit, such as it was, of an atomic bomb ran on at least two tracks at once, one sponsored by the army, the other by the navy.
The Japanese program was initiated by the Army Lieutenant General Takeo Yasuda in the spring of 1940. Yasuda, who was trained as an electrical engineer, had read about fission in science journals, and he requested a fellow officer with slightly more expertise in physics than himself to ‘explore the possibility of an atomic bomb’. The officer’s twenty-page report, which came out that October, expressed optimism that Japan might be able to capture enough uranium to build a bomb. The army contacted the Riken physicists the following April. The institute director handed the problem to Nishina, who, more interested in the performance of his cyclotron than in weapons production, let it languish. Meanwhile the navy, represented by Captain Yoji Ito, whose credentials in physics were somewhat better than those of his army counterparts, opened a discussion of nuclear research, presumably to include work on a bomb. After Midway, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto ordered his researchers to develop new weapons for the war and provided Ito’s committee with $500 (!) to begin its work. Evidently without knowing that Nishina had some fifteen months earlier been asked to assist with the army’s nuclear project, the navy committee invited Oyabun to serve as its chair. Each project was top secret, but Nishina was functionally in charge of both. While Nishina seems to have found his bureaucratic home thereafter in the navy committee, fission work continued on parallel and compartmentalized courses.
The Ito Committee met some ten times between July 1942 and March 1943. Ito later summarized its conclusions. While it was ‘obviously’ possible theoretically to make an atomic bomb, Japan lacked the uranium necessary to do it, and although there may have been deposits in the ‘wrinkles in the earth’ in Burma, there was no assurance of this. Above all, the committee considered it unlikely that the United States could produce an atomic bomb before the end of the war. This assessment reflected optimism about the limitations of American technology and perhaps pessimism about the duration of the war. Such conclusions discouraged the navy from continued, active pursuit of a nuclear bomb; Yamamoto’s decisive weapon would have to be something else.