CAN JAPAN GET THE BOMB WITH POD 1938

Title says it all. Someone has been in an intense arguement with me because of my view that the answer is no and they tell me my answer is "both one sided", and "only my opinion"

Edit: they must have by 1945, while still having a war in China
 
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If Japan ends its war with China, doesn't go to war with anyone else, somehow realizes the implications of fission research faster than Nobel Prize-winning folks did OTL, and throws much of its industrial base behind an effort to develop a bomb, you might get one by 1945.

You'd have to come up with a hell of a POD for that to happen, though, and it'd be quite a trick to keep it out of ASB territory.

IOTL, Japan had a broad industrial base -- it could manufacture almost anything Britain or the United States could -- but where the U.S. had a dozen factories that could do a thing, Japan might have one, and that one smaller than any of the American ones. IOTL, those factories were consumed by war production and had to endure American bombing.
 
Bah! you could have Japan get the Bomb with a PoD in 1945.

Of course, they mightn't get it until the mid-60s. The OP didn't specify WHEN Japan had to get the bomb.
 
1) Japan Empire and USA (or an improbable, VERY improbable Third Reich) are allied and their pal give to Rising Sun Empire the reciepe "how to make a bomb"

2)No

3)No, again

4)Maybe an insane and hilarious PoD who make project manhattan scientists maka a leap into 1938 Japan, and autorities didn't free this bunch of physicians before them let the reciepe for a bomb, allowing them to jump to life to life, hoping each time the next leap drive them home

5)No
 

The Vulture

Banned
Did your friend claim that if the bomb failed to go off when dropped on Hiroshima it could be reverse engineered and used to force a US surrender?
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Depends on the POD. I can not for the life of me think of how you can get it to work since the only way is to get in on Manhattan.
 

Cook

Banned
The Manhattan Project was horribly expensive, took a huge amount of the United State’s most advanced technology industries, required the best physicists and Engineers or both the United States, Britain and Refugee Europe, plus some extremely rear minerals that for the initial bomb came from the Belgian Congo.

Plus four years to accomplish.

A Japan that had the capability to do all that would not have been flying fighter aircraft that required flares and chalk boards to communicate between aircraft. If you increase their industrial capacity so much that they could have had their own Manhattan Project you change EVERYTHING.
 
Finding a 1938 POD or PODs for Japan producing an A-bomb by 1945 is challenging! Very challenging! Assuming that the war with China continues after 1938 makes it much harder compared to assuming that Japan and China make peace with German mediation in January 1938 (which might have been just possible if the Emperor had insisted). OK, let's try ...

The first step is to persuade either the IJA or the IJN that a bomb is possible. Now atom bombs were fairly popular in fiction in the thirties with stories such as “Public Faces” by Harold Nicolson in 1933 or “The Dark Frontier” by Eric Ambler in 1936. It is possible that these were inspired by Aston's accurate masses showing that huge energies were available if you could split or combine atoms. Anyway both novels were British as was Aston, so let us assume that someone tries to sell the Japanese the secret that the British are making an atom bomb from uranium. For the POD, he has to approach an attaché in early January 1938. Why would he chose uranium? We could assume that it just sounded obscure and appealed to him or that he has met someone in a bar who knew that splitting uranium could make a bang but my best idea is that he has met some British Army officer or military inventor, who has heard about the idea of a bomb and chosen it as his cover story. Why would he do that? Well let us start with a POD in Britain in which the officer or inventor has realised that uranium might be the best material for the shell from the new British anti-tank rifle. Now Japanese intelligence is not going to believe a silly idea like an atom bomb are they? Well they might investigate and discover that the British Army is buying uranium ore from the Belgians.

Now Japan probably realizes that it is not the world leader in physics, so panic follows. How can Japan make a quantum leap forwards (OK those are only very short leaps but …). Japan might have considered inviting Jewish refugees to Manchuria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_settlement_in_Imperial_Japan but now they need to get physicists quickly to spend one or two years in Japan and train trustworthy Japanese experts. The embassy in Berlin (and those elsewhere) is told to find physicists and chemists and offer them money to come to Japan. Perhaps Fermi would not be interested although some of his co-workers needed jobs in 1938 and perhaps a Japanese visitor would be welcomed. One clever idea would be to ask women (probably ASB for a Japanese but we will try anyway). Our Berlin attaché might find that Ida Noddack (Ida Tacke) would come if he husband was also invited (the NAZI had pushed her out of her position because women should not work but she received little sympathy because the Noddacks were fairly right wing). Ida believed that Fermi had split uranium with neutrons and was good at identifying elements from their X-ray spectra, so that might start various Japanese groups using neutrons. Lise Meitner might not have been interested when invited to visit Japan as she thinks of herself and is registered as an Austrian. However, she might remember being asked when Hitler invaded Austria and be desperate enough to go to the Japanese Embassy, who would be happy to create any useful documents.

All the above together with recruiting Japanese physicists should ensure that Japan would soon know as much as anyone about the effects of neutrons on uranium but would they conclude that a bomb is possible? A critical step was made by Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch when Meitner discussed Hahn's demonstration, which Hahn reported to Meitner by letter, that barium was produced from uranium. The step was to realise that there was fission (easy) and to guess what else was being produced, for example barium, krypton and two or three neutrons. The problem is that Frisch had been working in Bohr's lab and Bohr had initial proposed a drop or collective model of an atom. Thus Frisch was ideally prepared to see that extra neutrons were being produced and that a chain reaction was possible. If Meitner receives the same letter in Japan and discusses it with, for example, Yukawa, they might not propose that extra neutrons are formed (unfortunately it is hard to identify all the products as many are unstable and krypton and xenon are volatile). However, bringing Meitner to Japan would at least slow the acceptance of the Hahn and Stassmann result and just possibly prevent British or American projects being started before all the physicists are sent to work on radar! Frisch was able to confirm fission and Bohr reported the results in the USA in late January 1939. By April 1939, a French team was experimentally reporting 3.5 neutrons being produced per fission. The first Japanese to make a contribution were Arakatsu Bunsaku and Hagiwara Tokutaro, who in October 1939 published their estimate that 2.6 neutrons were released per fission (fairly accurate) and speculated that a chain reaction was possible. If Japan can reach that conclusion ahead of other powers, they may be able to buy much of the uranium ore stored after being mined in the Belgian Congo and solve one of the major problems delaying the later Japanese projects.

However, we have still not solved all the problems! Historically Japan dismally failed to enrich uranium. Probably they will fail in most situations because the chemistry of creating and handling uranium hexafluoride was difficult. During WW2, Nishina Yoshio considered building a reactor but did not have the tons of heavy water required. However, Japan did produce heavy water and it is only a question of scaling up the process and spending money. Very pure heavy water can moderate a chain reaction using natural uranium. So let's go along that route, perhaps to produce warships that do not need oil (the IJN were desperate and more unlikely solutions were considered). As the level of plutonium builds up in the rods, the reaction goes faster. Thus the reactor project becomes a plutonium breeder. Obviously, we need to expose rods for only a short time if we intend to use the plutonium for a bomb (to avoid Pu 240 etc.) but a reactor can have plutonium rich rods producing the neutrons to irradiate new rods. Now we only need to find some Japanese experts on how explosions travel through blocks made of two different explosives and some clever fuses (we leave that as an exercise for the reader).

There may be some interesting consequences much earlier than 1945. In 1941, Japanese policy seems very illogical but the problem was that everyone intelligent was in despair. It seemed likely that delaying the crisis could leave Japan in a worse position as the huge new America fleet hit the water. However, what if Japanese leaders believe, possibly very optimistically, that they are about to develop a super weapon?
 
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January 1, 1938

ASB's with OMCLs give Japan nuclear weapons and 'splain them how to use them and make more.
 

Blair152

Banned
That depends. My guess is maybe. Japan was way behind Germany and the
United States in its development of the Bomb. As I said before, there are unconfirmed reports of Japan testing a nuclear bomb on an island in North
Korea before we dropped the Bomb on Japan.
 
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