David Suzuki – a Bomb Fell on Hiroshima
By Patrick Bruskiewich December 2013
Why do the Suzuki, Nakamura and Yamamoto clans have such a hatred towards Dr. Gordon Shrum and the wartime President of UBC?
It might have something to do with the fact that Dr. Gordon Shrum and the wartime President of UBC, as well as some of the colleagues and friends of these gentleman, played an important role in defeating the Emperor of Japan and the Suzuki, Nakamura and Yamamoto Clans during the Second World War.
Dr. Shrum and a number of other UBC professors did some exemplary Special Intelligence service for Allies during the Second World War, and keep true to their oath of secrecy. I have written about the remarkable story of Station Point Grey and Special Intelligence under a separate cover.
It might also be because the Nakamura clan, David Suzuki’s maternal grandparents, hail from Hiroshima. We all know what happened there in August, 1945 …
Dr. George Griffiths and an interesting Story
In the early 1980’s Dr. George Griffith, an accomplished nuclear physicist, was teaching me an electronics course and when he found out that I was a naval reserve officer we struck up a friendship, which included lively discussion about things like the Battle of the Atlantic, the great submarine battle during the Second World War. (refer to Dr. George Griffiths, circa 1981).
Dr. Griffiths had done wartime service with the Royal Navy's "Y-Service" in Newfoundland and had been directly involved with the allied efforts to plot, intercept and decipher naval messages to and from German U-Boats in the North Atlantic.
Our weekly conversation and lunch of beef dip sandwiches had benefited greatly by the 1976 declassification of the ULTRA Secret, as well as a 1978 book describing how the Enigma machine code was broken at Bletchley Park.
Solving puzzles has always been a fancy to me. This was one of the reasons I chose a career in mathematics and physics and a reason why codes and ciphers intrigued me in.
Dr. George Griffiths, circa 1982 (Courtesy of the UBC Archives)
The Quiet Canadian
Dr. Griffiths had suggested I read the 1931 book by the American Herbert Yardley titled "The American Black Chamber'" a few weeks before I met Dr. Shrum for our one and only meeting.
Dr. Griffiths also suggested I read H. Montgomery Hyde’s 1964 book “The Quiet Canadian”, which told the story of Sir William Stephenson – the famous Intrepid, and the work of British Security Coordination, and the British Secret Service during World War Two.
The life of Sir William Stephenson had become popular folklore with the publication of the book The Man Called Intrepid, by a down and out journalist unfortunately was a book filled half with fact and half with fiction. H. Montgomery Hyde, on the other hand, worked for and with Intrepid during the Second World War, in particular with the infamous Vollard Case, and on other secret missions.
Sir William Stephenson – Looking out on New York Harbor from the Rockefeller Centre
The Vollard Caper was when the Nazis seized and then sent to America the superb Vollard collection of art pieces in an attempt to cash in on the plunder. H. Montgomery Hyde, in turn, pinched the Vollard collection away from the Nazis and arranged for its safe keeping for the duration of the war in Canada’s National Gallery in Ottawa.
In Montgomery Hydes’s own words:
“In October, 1940, the famous Vollard collection of impressionist paintings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was consigned by the Vichy authorities to a French art expert in New York named Martin Fabiani. There was reason to believe that Fabiani was acting on German instructions and intended to sell the collection to secure dollar exchange for Hitler. The consignment, which consisted of 270 paintings and drawings by Renoir, thirty paintings by Cezanne, twelve by Gauguin, seven by Degas and also some by Manet, Monet and Picasso, had been in various Paris museums, whence the British Ministry of Economic Warfare feared that they had been abstracted (The collection was formed by Ambrose Vollard. See his Recollections of a Picture Dealer, 1936).
The pictures were shipped from Lisbon for New York in the American Export Lines' Excalibur, which was brought into Bermuda by the British Contraband Control. Meanwhile instructions had been received from London to remove the contraband cargo. It fell to the writer of these pages to carry out this operation in defiance of the vessel's master who refused to open the strong-room where the precious packing cases reposed. This was eventually accomplished by blasting away in with oxy-acetylene flame burners, and the pictures were removed. So as to avoid the effects of the Bermuda climate, they were sent to Ottawa, where they were kept for the duration of the war in the Canadian National Gallery, having in the meantime been condemned as prize.”
Given my interest in exciting things, for some reason it was this little vignette – the Vollard Caper – that drove home the unique things that Intrepid and his agents did for the cause of freedom during the Second World War. You couldn’t make this stuff up even in Hollywood.
Gordon Shrum and the Man called Intrepid
Over our beef dip sandwich the previous week Dr. Griffiths told me ‘on the QT’ that Dr. Gordon Shrum did work with and for Sir William Stephenson and B.S.C. during the Second World War, and that he knew the likes of Ian Fleming. Gordon Shrum was also a friend to Lester Bowles Pearson who set up the Examination Unit which decrypted Axis coded messages. But Dr. Griffiths added “even today the nature of Gordon’s work is still classified.”
I, in turn, explained to Dr. Griffiths that the Flemings and the Bruces go back a long way, to as least as far back as Michael of Bruce and the Battle of Waterloo. I explained to him that my surname Bruskiewich means son of Bruce. Michael of Bruce was a British Secret Agent who smuggled a rather important French gentleman out of prison the night before his scheduled appointment with Monsieur Guillotine.
When the guards arrived the following morning they find Michael of Bruce instead of their prisoner. It would have been bad form for the French to guillotine an Englishmen who was a colleague and friend of Wellington and the British Cabinet in London. After some haggling and the exchange of some gold pieces Michael of Bruce was set free.
Michael of Bruce was asked by Wellington to remain in central Europe to help guarantee the Peace after the Treaty of Vienna. The work he did included special intelligence and many intrigues exploits, many of which even today remain locked away in the archives at Westminster. Michael of Bruce is the role model behind the near to real life character the Scarlet Pimpernel.
George Griffiths was very amused by this, which helped to cement our friendship. He had read about the Scarlet Pimpernel when he was a child.
On the more serious side, I also explained to Dr. Griffiths that two of my ancestors attended to Queen Victoria when she created the Dominion of Canada in 1867, and that I am related to both Lord Durham who married a Bruce and to James of Bruce one of Canada’s 19th century Governor Generals.
The following week Dr. Gordon Shrum would invite me for lunch and a special conversation at the advice and suggestion of Dr. George Griffiths (see Station Point Grey and Special Intelligence: Part 1).
Dr. Gordon Shrum and Some of his Colleagues
After the Second World War Dr. Shrum would invite a number of unique physicist to make the University of British Columbia their home.
Take, for instance, Dr. George Lawson Pickard (1913 - 2007) who was a professor of oceanography at UBC from 1949 to his retirement in 1974, had during the second world war did weapons development work for the RAF and RN.
As his family wrote of Dr. George l. Pickard, in his 2007 obituary:
“With the onset of WW II George worked with Sir R.V. Jones, at the Clarendon Laboratory Oxford, on the first successful use of infrared radiation to detect aircraft at night. In 1938 he was posted to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnbourgh becoming Senior Scientific Officer and later Squadron Leader. George designed a simple two- spotlight beam altimeter to assist aircraft to fly at low altitudes for night attacks on submarines. He later applied this technique to Lancaster aircraft used for attacks on the Ruhr dams – a mission made famous in the book and movie “The Dam Busters”. Testing navigational aids required many flights over water and occupied Europe. In 1942 George qualified for membership in “The Goldfish Club” by surviving after his plane went down in the English Channel. In recognition of George’s contributions to the War effort, in 1946, he was decorated as a Member of the British Empire.”
The Dam Buster raid on the three Ruhr dams, Mohne, Edersee and the Sorpe – Operation Chastise – on the 16-17th May, 1943 was made possible because of the precise altitude that could be flown due to Dr. Pickard’s two-spotlight altimeter that had been already developed for use aboard long range ASW patrol planes. The Dam Buster raid was made by Lancaster bombers of RAF No. 617 Squadron, led by the famous Wing Commander Guy Gibson.
What was remarkable about this raid was the bouncing bomb designed by Barnes Wallis, a bomb that had to be launched a precise distance from the target, at a precise speed and at a precise altitude. The first two parameters were easily achieved, but the precise altitude was the key parameter. It was Dr. Pickard’s two-spot altimeter which saved the day.
Dr. George Lawson Pickard, circa 1942 Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnbourgh
For those of you who have seen the 1955 film The Dam Busters based on Guy Gibson’s book Enemy Coast Ahead and Paul Brickhill’s book The Dam Busters, you might remember the scene in which the actor playing Guy Gibson happens to notice hos two spot-lights converged on stage during a London night club performance, and how that give him the bright idea as to how to determine his height precisely at night time … this is just a bit of artistic licence on the part of the screenplay writers, nothing more.
It is note worth noting the role that Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham played in the success of the Dam Buster Raid. It was this same Group Captain Winterbotham who would in the 1970’s make public the Enigma Secret, in a book of the same name. George Griffiths and I had both read the Winterbotham book and enjoyed it immensely
Having met and talked with him on occasion in the early 1980’s, I knew of the important work Dr. George Pickard had done on aircraft delivered depth charges and the forward thrown hedgehogs in anti-submarine warfare. He knew that the Canadian ship’s I sailed on in the early 1980’s had as part of its weaponry a mortar launcher of special importance. It was designed to lob nuclear depth charges off the stern of the ship (little Lulu’s as they were known), and could, obviously also lob conventional ordnance with shaped charge explosive designed to cut through the hulls of submarines with high temperature tungsten plasma.
I was amused to be told by Dr. George L. Pickard himself that to prevent the Germans from guessing that the British had cracked their Enigma code, the British planted a false story about a special infrared camera being used to locate surfaces and submerged U-boats. The German navy responded by developing a special paint for submarines that exactly duplicated the optical properties of salt water.
It was through both Dr. Pickard and Dr. Griffiths that I would be introduced to the work of a remarkable man, Dr. Reginald Victor Jones (R.V. to his friends). Dr. R.V. Jones (1911 – 1997) worked with Dr. Pickard at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnbourgh.
Early in the war Dr. Jones set up a special division at Hut 3 at Bletchley Park to gather and analyst German Scientific and Technical Intelligence. In one of the great raids of the Second World War, a raid suggested by Dr. Jones, British commandos captured German radar equipment at Bruneval in France – Operation Biting, 27/28 February, 1942 – allowing them to learn how to spoof the equipment. Dr. Jones would become a Commander of the British Empire as a result of this successful Special Operations.
Dr. Jones had previously developed Window, what is now called Chaff, as a way of blinding radar systems with thin strips of foil cut to lengths specific to the radar being jammed. One of the more poignant of these undertakings was how R.V. Jones was able to bend the Knickerbein radio bombing guidance system during the Battle for Britain away from German targets. This episode became known as the Battle of the Beams.
Dr. R. V. Jones in his study, circa 1980
Dr. Jones also served as an advisor on Operation Cross Bow which targeted German V-1 and V-2 Rocket development and the Double Cross Committee, under the chairman of John Cecil Masterman.
Though the Double Cross Committee Dr. Jones’ role was to help to feed German Intelligence with false scientific and technical information: Late in the war Dr. Jones was able to steer the V-1 and V-2 attacks away from the heart of London by sending false impact reports back to Germany through the German double agents being run by the . This false intelligence saved thousands of lives. Information gathered through many sources, including Special Intelligent Sources like Station Point Grey ended up on his desk for analysis.
Winston Churchill held a high regard for the ‘young man’ as he called Dr. R.V. Jones.
As part of D-Day, Dr. R.V. Jones played a key role in Operation Fortitude, which was meant to boondoggle the Germans in thinking the Allies were going to invade France at the Pas de Calais. He and his boffin friends jammed and spoofed the German coastal radar in thinking a mighty landing force was approaching the coast of the Pas de Calais, at the very same moment the allies were undertaking their real landing in Normandy.
Many years after the war Dr. Jones had written a remarkable book about his work that is a must read titled Most Secret War. Once that book became public the flood gates opened and many rather touching and unique stories about Special Intelligence began to find their way into the public eye.
Dr. John B. Warren of the UBC physics Department, considered the father of accelerator physics in western Canada, was famous for having led the wartime development of the Identification: Friend or Foe (IFF) transponder at the Telecommunications Research Establishment in England. Dr. Warren knew R.V. personally.
John Warren’s obituary issued by the UBC Senate in 1989 is rather telling:
JOHN BERNARD WARREN (1914-1989)
John Bernard Warren, a pioneer in the field of nuclear physics, and a longtime faculty member at this university, passed away on September 7 of this year.
John Warren was born in London, England in 1914. He was an outstanding scholar, earning his B.Sc. with First Class Honours from Imperial College at the age of twenty, and received his Ph.D. two years later. Among other achievements, Dr. Warren was awarded the Governor's Prize in Physics in 1934.
After gaining experience in various research positions in Britain, Dr. Warren was seconded to Atomic Energy Laboratories in Montreal and Chalk River in 1946. In the following year he came to UBC as an Associate Professor of Physics. He spent the next thirty two years as a teacher and researcher in his chosen field, establishing an outstanding reputation in both capacities.
While born in England, John Warren became a deeply committed Canadian. He was a proponent of excellence at all levels of education and devoted much of his energy to the development of the high school curriculum and to the provision of greater educational opportunities for the people of this nation. To this end he took a leading role in the creation of both the Open Learning Institute and the Knowledge Network of B.C.
John Warren placed his stamp upon many graduate students and is widely regarded as the outstanding figure in the nuclear physics community of Canada. He also pioneered many successful research studies, and was a major contributor to the creation of the TRIUMF project, where he served as Director from 1968 to 1971. He was a member of Senate from 1964 to 1965. In his private life John Warren was a sportsman of renown, a lifelong tennis player, and a lover of music.
In every sense of the term, he was a visionary who saw a better future emerging from a nation's commitment to scientific enquiry. John Warren's contributions to knowledge will be long remembered. To his surviving family, the Senate of The University of British Columbia extends its deepest sympathy.
Dr. Warren once told the author a story of an important strategy meeting he attended along with R.V. Jones that was chaired by Winston Churchill. The discussion at hand was the efficiency and reliability of their new I.F.F. – Identification Friend or Foe – transponder that Dr. Warren and his colleagues had developed for use on R.A.F. bombers.
The German had become successful in infiltrating returning RAF bomber streams and had been shooting down bombers on their return flights to the UK. The RAF wanted a way in which to distinguish friendly returning bomber aircraft from infiltrating enemy aircraft so that the RAF night fighters and the ground based ack-ack could deal with the enemy planes.
At the meeting they had brought one of the I.F.F transponders his "little black box" to Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the war room.. ‘It was a rather fragile thing a bit bigger than a bread box’ as Dr. Warren explained to the author (recounted by the author in the article George Volkoff, UBC and the Triumf Project, available through archive. Org)
“Sceptical of boffins and their inventions, as the council debated the merits of the IFF, Churchill began to push the box further and further to the edge of the table with his walking stick until suddenly, the prototype toppled off the table. Dr. Warren lunged forward and grabbed the prototype before it hit the floor.
At that point Churchill stood, took his cigar out of his mouth and announced his decision that "if it is so important to save ... it is worth a try"
Dr. John Bernard Warren Depart. of Physics UBC, 1949
Dr. George Volkoff ( 1914 – 2000) at UBC, who during the Second World War headed the Montreal Theory Group, told me on the QT that he had modelled the physics of the first atom bomb Little Boy, and worked on the design of nuclear reactors fueled either with U-235 and U-233.
Dr. Volkoff had been one of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s graduate students and had written a Ph.D. thesis with his supervisor and a seminal paper about Neutron Stars in 1939.
It was George Volkoff who in 1943 suggested that a hollow cylinder made up of a set of rings of U-235 be fired into a slug of U-235, and not the other way around, that is crucial to the design of Little Boy (if you shot a slug into a hollow cylinder the efficiency of such an arrangement is much lower given the physics of the configuration chosen for This Man).
George would go onto design the ZEEP, NRX, NRU and Candu reactors until his retirement in 1980. His obituary (written by Erich Vogt) is rather telling:
GEORGE MICHAEL VOLKOFF
B.A. (UBC), M.A. (UBC), Ph.D. (Univ. of Cal., Berkeley), D.Sc. Honoris Causa (UBC), Dean Emeritus
George Michael Volkoff was born in Moscow, Russia on February 23, 1914 and died in the Purdy pavilion at UBC on April 24, 2000, after a lengthy illness. He had a strong association with the University of British Columbia for 70 years and served on the UBC Senate 1950-54, 1961-63, and 1969-79. George arrived in Canada with his family in 1924 as an eleven-year-old. He completed elementary school in Vancouver and then followed his family to Harbin, Manchuria where he completed his secondary school. He entered UBC in 1930 as a sixteen year old and graduated in 1934, winning the Governor General's medal as head of the graduating class.
After obtaining his master's degree at UBC in 1936, George went to Berkeley to work with Robert Oppenheimer. His Ph.D. work, published in 1939, became very famous and was instrumental in Volkoff becoming and Officer of the Order of Canada 55 years later. This work concerned the predictions of the properties of collapsed stars, resulting from supernova explosions: it showed that such massive objects were essentially made entirely of neutrons and had densities of a million billion times that of water. This paper at first lay neglected until, in the middle 1960's, pulsars were discovered and identified as neutron stars of just the kind that Oppenheimer and Volkoff had predicted. Volkoff was appointed as Assistant Professor in the UBC Physics Department in 1940. During 1943-46 he was on leave to the nascent Canadian atomic energy project. He was responsible for the lattice calculations for the first large reactor in Canada, the NRX reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, completed in 1946. For this wartime work Volkoff was awarded a D.Sc. (Honoris Causa) by UBC in 1945 (at age 31, perhaps the youngest recipient of such a degree from UBC) and the M.B.E. in 1946.
On returning to UBC in 1946 Volkoff embarked on research in the new field of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and supervised the very first student, Tom Collins, to receive a UBC Ph.D. He continued an excellent teaching career at UBC and rendered great service to the University as Physics Department Head (1961-71) and Dean of Science (1971-79) and gave his outstanding judgement to countless other UBC bodies. He also served on many national and international committees in the service of science.
George Volkoff was known around the world for his early scientific brilliance, his intelligence, his fairness and his interest in people and intellectual affairs. He gave lifelong service to UBC and brought the University great distinction.
I was taught the foundations of nuclear reactor physics by George, and have written three articles about my friend George Volkoff.
Dr. George Michael Volkoff Depart. of Physics UBC, 1980
Little Boy was dropped on the Military target of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, and helped to bring a speedy end to the Second World War.
The Little Boy U-235 atom bomb was deployed as part of OPERATION ALBERTA. You may speculate why Alberta was chosen as its code name. It reflected Canada’s contribution to the war effort as well as being a word that starts with an ‘A’.
The insides of the Little Boy was rather simple in its design (see Fig. : Schematic of Little Man).
At Volkoff’s suggestion six rings of approximately 80% enriched U-235 were the projectile, while six pegs of U-235 were set atop of the impact absorbing anvil. Four polonium-beryllium frangible neutron sources were set between the nine pegs of U-235 and the impact absorbing anvil.
There is a rather rare picture from Operation Alberta: Commander A. Francis Birch (left) assembles the bomb while physicist Norman Ramsey watches. This is one of the rare photos where the inside of the Little Boy can be seen.
Fig. : Schematic of Little Boy. (note the U-235 rings in the Projectile).
Special Intelligence undertaken by Station Point Grey prevented the Germans and Japanese to share nuclear materials and complete the design- build of nuclear weapons. The sinking of IJN submarine I-52 as well as the capture of 1,235 pounds of Uranium in transit from Nazi Germany to Imperial Japan aboard U-234 are two examples of this Special Intelligence work explained in the Station Point Grey and Special Intelligence group of articles.
The Inside of Little Boy during assembly, Courtesy of Los Alamos National Lab
The 1,235 pounds of Uranium in transit from Nazi Germany to Imperial Japan was to be used in a Japanese Atomic bomb based on a two-point advanced design that the Germans were perfecting, the design of which had been shared with the Japanese. In an radiological assay of the shipping documents which went with the cargo of 1,235 pounds of uranium that was captured off U-234 in 1945, it was assessed that part of the cargo was U-235 enriched to over 70%.
There is anecdotal evidence that this captured, enriched U-235 was shipped to Oak Ridge and incorporated in the feed material of enriched U-235 used in the Little Boy atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Perhaps around 20% of the U-235 in Little Boy came from the seized material on its way to Japan. Little Boy used U-235 enriched to over 80 %.
The rest of the Uranium used in Little Boy came from mines in Canada. Intercepts gathered at Station Point Grey played a key role in the capture of the U-234 cargo. As mentioned above, The Little Boy U-235 atom bomb was deployed as part of Operation Alberta. Alberta was chosen as its code name. It reflected Canada’s contribution to the war effort as well as being a word that starts with an ‘A’.
Dr. Christy from Manitoba would play a crucial role in the development of Fat Man. In fact the Fat Man core is known as the Christy Core because of its intricate design – a sort of layered cake with varies density, surrounded by shaped charges. The design was a sort of impedance matching problem, coupled with the problem of uniform compression. Without the impedance match too much of the compression wave would have been reflected outwards instead of directed inwards.
In 1945 another Canadian, a mathematician from Ontario, Dr. Carson Mark, joined the Theoretical division of Los Alamos. In the 1980’s, the somewhat young and inquisitive author would correspond with Dr. J. Carson Mark at the suggestion of Dr. George Volkoff. He would also meet and discuss substantive matters with Dr. Carson Marks colleague at LANL, Ted Taylor in the late 1980’s at a NRDC conference in Nevada.
Along with modeling neutron diffusion in cylindrical systems, the Montreal Theory Group, along with Chalk River, also worked on Uranium – 233.
The German – Japanese Nuclear Weapons Program
Dr. Fred Kaempffer spent the Second World War doing theoretical and applied physics at Gottingen University, in Germany. Gottingen had been a centre for advanced aeronautics and nuclear research from 1937 to 1945. After the Second World War Colonel Gordon Shrum would make arrangements to bring Dr. Kaempffer to UBC.
Uranium – 235 was the primary route to a functioning atom bomb. Uranium – 233 would be the second road that both the Germans and Japanese ventured down using Thorium-232 as a fertile material in their nuclear weapons efforts.
After the war John Warren would join UBC in 1949 and by 1951 build a van der Graff generator at the Hennings Building patterned after a design used by German and Japanese wartime nuclear weapons program. Dr. Warren would also work closely with a German expatriate, Dr. Frederick Kaempffer who joined UBC at Dr. Shrum’s invitation a few years after the Second World War as part of Operation Mousetrap.
In the article George Michael Volkoff and the TRIUMF Project I make mention of how Dr. Kaempffer came to Canada:
“By 1946, Dr. Shrum, who at the time, was pending his service overseas as a colonel with the Canadian Army in Germany, would arrange for Dr. Frederick A. Kaempffer to be brought to UBC from Gottigen in the way of reparations by border of the Government of Canada and under the Great Seal of King George.”
The Shrum-Warren-Kaempffer collaboration managed to put together a rather complete picture of the many successes of the Axis nuclear program – (yes you read this statement correctly THE MANY SUCCESSES)!
At the heart of this post war work by John Warren and his colleagues was a 4 MeV van der Graaff accelerator, located at the Hennings Building at UBC, and similar in design to accelerators used by both Germany and Japan in their wartime nuclear weapons development work. (refer to Fig : A 1951 schematic of the UBC van der Graaff accelerator and Fig. : The Top and Exterior of the UBC van der Graaff accelerator).
At the heart of one of the research programs in both the German and Japanese nuclear weapons program was the 5 million electron volt van der Graaff accelerator that was designed Dr. Gerlach and operated by the Germans at two sites, one south of Berlin and one in Silesia (now part of Poland). Similar systems were in operation at a site on the Japanese mainland and in Korea.
The 5 million electron volt van der Graaff accelerator was called a Glocke by the Germans, which is German for bell. You will note the shape of the Gerlach 5 MeV accelerator.
A 1951 schematic of the UBC 4.0 MeV van der Graaff accelerator
The Top and Exterior of the UBC van der Graaff accelerator
In 2013 the author wrote a novel Helles Licht (Bright Light) about the illicit and still somewhat secretive nuclear weapons work done between 1943 and 1945 by the two Axis powers. The cover of the author’s book includes a drawing prepared by the Nazis in 1942 for their 5 MeV accelerator.
The 5 MeV Gerlach Accelerator Featured on the Cover of Helles Licht
At the heart of this accelerator program on the German side were Dr. Von Ardenne. Dr. F. Houterman and Dr. Gerlach. On the Japanese side were Dr. Nishina, Dr. Tomonaga and Dr. Yukawa.
Dr. Hideki Yukawa would win a Nobel Prize in Physics shortly after the end of the war. J. Robert Oppenheimer himself recommended him for the Prize. Some would say it was to buy Yukawa’s silence.
The Germans called their secret Atom Bomb project – Einsatz Riesen – Operation Enormous. I find it more than a coincidence that Dr. von Ardenne and his laboratory and materials were captured by the Soviet Red Army in 1945 and that Dr. von Ardenne agreed to work for the Soviets on their Atomic Bomb project which they chose to also call ‘Project Enormous.’
There is some evidence that the Germans appear to have undertaken two nuclear tests before their surrendered, the first a sub-critical assembly test and a second a test which produced a yield in the kiloton range. From what was told me they did not use a solid core in their design, but a hollow core with two detonation points.
Playing a sort of Queen’s gambit with Ted Taylor in the spring of 1988, a second source confirmed this evidence. Many of the low yield US and Soviet tactical nuclear weapons are direct descendants of the German 1945 design.
From 1942 through to their surrender in May 1945 the Nazis provided their Japanese allies with complete access to all their nuclear technology and it appears that the Japanese undertook a successful test in early August, 1945 on an island off Korea, not too far from the industrial centre of Hungnam. In August 1945 the Russians swooped into Korea, capturing much of the Japanese Nuclear weapons program then in place around Hungnam.
One of the great myths created by the Japanese is that there was no uranium ores, or thorium to be found in Korea. The fact is that, less than four decades after the Japanese surrender North Korea had by the early 1980’s shown the world that there are plentiful supplies of uranium ore in North Korea and that they are self-sufficient in uranium and can produce nuclear weapons.
It appears that North Koreans were mining uranium ore for the Soviet Union as early as 1947/48 and this uranium found its way into the Soviet Union’s first reactors and atom bombs.
The second great myth created by the Japanese is that they never worked on nuclear weapons or never got close to testing such weapons. Much of the evidence of their efforts were either hidden or destroyed in the weeks between the cessation of hostilities and the formal surrender of Japan.
A Suzuki at the Centre of the Japanese Nuclear Weapons Efforts
Suzuki Tatsusaburo who worked with Nishina Yoshio to enrich U-235 at Nishina’s Riken laboratory in Tokyo, and at a Imperial Japanese Navy super-secret Nuclear weapons development site near Hungnam, Korea.
In a 1995 interview, the only one given by Suzuki Tatsuaburo (given to a Dutch group with the proviso it not be aired in Japan) he stated that they
“ … had built an installation for thermal diffusion. We had built a separator-installation and we had experimented with nuclear fission on the basis of uranium hexafluoride. …”
This thermal diffusion technology was one of the nuclear technologies shared by the Nazis with their Japanese wartime allies. The Hungnam site also housed a number of van der Graaf accelerators being used a neutron sources. At the Hungnam facility, there was a Uranium as we as a Thorium purification and enrichment facility.
Imperial Japanese Navy Nuclear Weapons development site, Hungnam, North Korea.
Shortly after the Dutch broadcast was interview by a science reporter with the New York Times. An excerpt of the Suzuki Tatsusaburo New York Times 1995 interview is here given (NYT, August 8th, 1995):
“Tatsusaburo Suzuki, now white-haired at 83, was one of the leaders of the Japanese research effort. Then a young physicist, he produced a report for the military in 1940 suggesting that an atomic bomb was feasible.
He then spent the war years with a team of about 50 scientists working on the bomb, but the wartime Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo, did not provide nearly the resources that the team needed.
"People like Mr. Tojo said we should hurry in our research," Mr. Suzuki said in a long interview in the cramped living room of his Tokyo house, filled with old physics books. "But he said that only after the war situation turned against Japan."
Those Japanese who have heard of the nuclear research programs often regard them as unimportant, perhaps because their existence conflicts with self-perceptions of Japan as exclusively a victim of the nuclear age.
On the other hand, many Americans regard Tokyo's nuclear efforts as very significant at a moral level. For Americans troubled by guilt over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is perhaps reassuring to think that the United States was not more inclined to mass killing than Japan, but simply more technically sophisticated.
The Japanese effort to build the bomb was serious, with backing from those close to the Emperor, but it did not have anything like the extraordinary resources that were used in the Manhattan Project to build the American bomb …
Although Japan scoured the territories it controlled, from Korea to Burma, it was hampered by difficulties in obtaining uranium ore to work with. The researchers did get some from a mine in northern Korea, and then in March 1945 a German submarine was on its way to Japan with a cargo of 1,235 pounds of uranium oxide.
The German commander of the submarine surrendered to an American ship, two Japanese officers on board committed suicide, and there has been speculation that the uranium may have been incorporated into the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The uranium transaction was simply a commercial deal, and Japanese and German scientists did not cooperate in trying to build a nuclear weapon. It is not clear whether they would have made much more progress if they had …
Scholars say Japan would presumably have used the bomb, but by the latter part of the war the Imperial Army would have had difficulty transporting a nuclear weapon very far without having a plane shot down or a ship sunk.
One indication that Japan might have been willing to use the bomb appears in the writings of Yoichi Yamamoto, an army officer who took part in the Japanese effort to obtain uranium and later vigorously defended the American dropping of the bomb. When they are at war, he said, countries do what they must.
Another sign that Japan was prepared, in principle, to attack American civilians came at the end of 1944 when Tokyo mounted a bizarre balloon attack against the United States.
Women all over Japan were put to work stitching giant balloons, which then rode the prevailing winds and carried small explosives to the United States and Canada. Most landed in the sea or in remote areas, but one balloon killed several people in a logging community in Oregon.
At the end of the war, one military unit also hatched a plan to use a submarine and light plane for a suicide mission to infect San Diego with plague-carrying fleas. The war ended before the mission could be carried out, and in any case it is not clear that it would have been.
Aside from peace campaigners and those who have read extensively about the war, few Japanese know about their country's attempt to build a bomb. One group of high school students in Hiroshima said they had never heard of it, and the famous Hiroshima museum devoted to the atomic bombing does not mention it.
This disturbs some Japanese, who say people should know not just about Japan as a victim of the bomb but also about its attempt to build one.
"I think the Hiroshima museum and the textbooks should mention the Japanese project to build the bomb, because the only difference was that Japan was behind the United States," said Sho Ishida, 20, a student at Hiroshima University. "If Japan had developed it first, Japan might have used it."
One route that the Japanese appear to have pursued in their efforts to build nuclear weapons was in the use of Thorium as a fertile material and the production of U-233 – a fissile material that could be made into an atom bomb – using neutrons produced by van der Graff accelerators.
If you bombard beryllium or lithium with high energy electrons, or protons you can produce neutrons. Similarly if you bombard beryllium or lithium with deuterium you get neutrons. Deuterium was being produced at the Imperial Japanese Navy nuclear research facility at Hungnam.
If you ran a stable of six to twelve van der Graff accelerators for several months you would have produced enough U-233 to build a nuclear weapon with a yield in the 3 to 6 kiloton range. This appears to be what was ongoing at the von Ardenne lab near Berlin and the IJN facility at Hungnam.
The Gouzenko Case and the U-233 Angle
The Uranium 233 angle would also play out in the Gouzenko matter when, in the words of H. Montgomery Hyde it would mark the trail back to a Soviet spy at the centre of Canadian wartime nuclear work (Zabotin was a Soviet ‘papa spy’ in Canada):
“… one telegram signed ‘Grant ‘ , which was Zabotin's cover name, dated July 9, 1945, read in part:
Alek handed over to us a platinum with 162 micrograms of Uranium 233 in the form of acid, contained in a thin lamina.
The identity of 'Alek' was soon discovered. He turned out to be Dr. Alan Nunn May, a British physicist working on research into nuclear fission in the Montreal laboratories of the Canadian National Research Council. He had been a secret Communist and a willing Soviet agent for some time.”
The Remarkable Physicists at the UBC Physics Department
All in all, the UBC Physics Department of the 1980’s held a rather unique collection of rather remarkable physicists. At the heart of this rather unique collection was Dr. Gordon Shrum a Great Canadian and a friend to Sir William Stephenson – the Man Called Intrepid – to and Lester Bowles Pearson.
“even today the nature of Gordon’s work is still classified.”