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Nuclear Weapons Programs learned little, but a second mission sent into northern Europe in 1944 discovered that the German program had made little headway After the war, interrogations of captured scientists confirmed that German research was still several years away from making a bomb and had yet to solve several key technical puzzles The research gap resulted partly from Hitler’s fixation on making breakthroughs in conventional weaponry such as rockets, jet aircraft, and snorkel equipment for his U-boat fleet In part, it flowed from Nazi ideology that steered even scientific research in peculiar theoretical directions Mostly, the gap widened during the war because of the sheer brilliance of the team assembled under the Manhattan Project and the massive resources the United States and its allies brought to bear on nuclear weapons research The Japanese atomic program was based at the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research in Tokyo, with subprograms in Kyoto and Osaka Roosevelt’s ban on uranium exports to Japan from December 1940 severely limited Japanese research Another factor was lack of sufficient cyclotrons or access to heavy water Gross interservice competition between the Japanese Army and Navy was a major handicap As in most wartime Japanese weapons research and design, the Army and Navy conducted separate nuclear programs, greatly thinning out resources and hampering atomic research The Japanese lacked enough uranium for their research programs and asked for fissile materials from Germany The request was intercepted by American intelligence, alerting Washington that the Japanese were seeking to build an atomic bomb Fundamentally, it was the underlying weakness of the Japanese economy that limited research spending and resources That was critically important because, as Japan turned away from atomic research for other reasons, its military wrongly concluded that a fission atomic bomb was not possible A key result of that false conclusion was that, although some Japanese researchers knew atomic bombs were indeed theoretically possible to build even if they remained beyond the reach of their country’s engineering, Japan’s top leaders did not at first believe that the device dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was an atomic bomb They spent a full day and then more precious hours debating the question, even as the USAAF readied to drop a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, and the Soviet Union launched an all-out attack into Manchuria Less is known about the Soviet Union’s wartime nuclear weapons programs, except that it got underway no later than 1942 Like Britain and the United States, the Soviets did not share information about their research even with principal allies It was finally confirmed in the mid-1990s that Soviet wartime researchers were—as was long suspected in the West—heavily dependent on information gleaned from spies inside the Anglo-American nuclear weapons programs The Soviet “ENORMOUS” nuclear espionage program elucidated how serious was pursuit of atomic weapons by the Western Allies and provided Moscow with key theoretical and technical direction toward independent development of nuclear weapons The actual development and testing of a Soviet bomb was a postwar story rather than one belonging to World War II, but it had roots in the wartime race against Germany A secondary race was run in the Soviet view against the weapons 799
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