Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb

The author's research shows the Japanese came far closer to cracking the atomic riddle than they have ever let on. After a half-century of stonewalling by the Japanese and loss of records by the United State government, Robert Wilcox couldn't find the definite answers. Much of his research is unfortunately larded with such phrases as "perhaps" or "possibly." Some of the oral accounts of a Japanese bomb experiment are secondhand or possibly repeated versions of a similar rumor. But the records he dug out of the National Archives (cited box by box) show a pattern of frantic wartime expenditures on fission materials by Japan, attempts to build uranium separators, and plans by the Japanese navy and army to use atomic weapons if the scientists could only finish them in time. The Japanese have never admitted to massive wartime atrocities, let alone their own attempt at building a bomb. The biggest riddle of the book is whether the Japanese, as some reports say, test-detonated their own bomb at a site in present-day North Korea just before the Soviet army closed in. The definite answer may be lost forever.