JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This is document 63 of 80 from "The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, a Collection of Primary Sources", from the National Secuiry Archive Electronic Briefing Book No 162, edited by William Burr (2005). (The full source is available here.) It is here where there is a brief review of supposed Japanese development of an atomic bomb. the information was courtesy of the MAGIC, a cryptonym for the successful effort of the United States Army Signals Intelligence Section (SIS) and the Navy Communication Special Unit to decode intercepted high-level Janapese messages. (A quick appraisal of MAGIC is available here.) Suffice to say for this quick post that the efforts of American cryptographers (with some help from our cousins in the U.K. at Bletchley Park) landed the U.S. the ability to read and render Japanese critical and encoded communications virtually from the very beginning of the war.
Read more: http://www.faqs.org/espionage/Nt-Pa/Operation-Magic.html#ixzz2OPnQy4oJ
The cover sheet:
Page three of the MAGIC document reveals that the Japanese government may/may not have been in the earliest developing phase for builidng an atomic bomb for themselves. It is unclear if the word/sentence segment refered to something that was or somethat that could be. Nevertheless, it was reported that planning had not exceeded the initial phase. I think it is not debatable that the only country that had enough resources to develop the bomb in the 1940-1945 period was the United States--it was clearly beyond the means of any other country on the Earth to develop a bomb in 1945, and if memory serves the electrical power alone necessary for the production of bomb elements was already a substantial chunk of all of the power being generated in all of Japan in 1944.)
And this, a summary of the Japanese high command and leading government figures on 10 August discussing the possibility of surrender following the second atomic bomb:
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