* Which brings us to April 1945.
* Only weeks before Germany surrendered on May 7, FDR dies.
* And Truman takes over as POTUS.
* He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb.
* He was briefed on it immediately by Sec of War Stimson.
* By the time Truman took office, Japan was near defeat.
* Keep in mind that the bomb was developed primarily to fight the Nazis.
* But now that they are out of the picture, nobody wants a $2 billion white elephant.
* At this stage, American aircraft were attacking Japanese cities at will.
* As we mentioned recently, the B-29 was the world’s first pressurized bomber.
* So it could fly at high altitudes that the few remaining Japanese fighters couldn't reach.
* Although kamikaze pilots did take down quite a few.
* BTW, do you know what the B stands for in B-29?
* Lots of people think it stands for “bomber”.
* But it really secretly stands for the name of the guy who came up with the name of the planes - Barry.
* It’s the Barry-29.
* A single fire-bomb raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed nearly 100,000 people and injured over a million.
* On 13 April, the Imperial Army Air Force’s laboratory where early Japanese research on the atomic bomb had been done was hit.
* And that’s something we haven’t talked about - the Japanese attempts to build a bomb.
* In 1934, Tohoku University professor Hikosaka Tadayoshi released his "atomic physics theory".
* Hikosaka pointed out the huge energy contained by nuclei and the possibility that both nuclear power generation and weapons could be created.
* Keep in mind that the West didn’t understand that concept until 1938 when the Germans worked it out.
* Leading Japanese physicist Nishina Yoshio was keen on utilizing nuclear fission as a military weapon, but was also justifiably concerned that other countries like the U.S., were also trying to create a nuclear weapon.
* Before the war, he was apparently friendly with Einstein and Neils Bohr
* Nishina had previously established his own Nuclear Research Laboratory to study high-energy physics in 1931 at RIKEN Institute (the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research), which had been established in 1917 in Tokyo to promote basic research.
* BTW, Ricoh, the Japanese camera company, also came out of Riken.
* In 1936 Nishina constructed a 26-inch (660 mm) cyclotron, and a 60-inch (1,500 mm), 220-ton cyclotron in 1937.
* In 1938 he also purchased a cyclotron from the University of California, Berkeley.
* After meeting Japanese director of Japan’s Army Aeronautical Department's Technical Research Institute, lieutenant-general Yasuda Takeo (surname first), Nishina told him about the possibility of Japan building its own nuclear weapon’s arsenal.
* In April of 1941, Army Minister and later Prime Mininster Tojo Hideki (yeah, that Tojo) ordered Yasuda to look further into the possibility of Japan being able to create nuclear weapons.
* Yasuda then passed the order down to viscount Ōkōchi Masatoshi director of the RIKEN Institute, who then passed the order down to Nishina.
* By this time, Nishina had over 100 nuclear researchers.
* Japan’s Army and Navy were always in competition with one another, so perhaps it would come as no surprise that the Imperial Japanese Navy's Technology Research Institute had been looking in to the possibility of creating nuclear weapons, too.
* They had been in talks with scientists from the Imperial University in Tokyo, for advice on constructing and possible use of nuclear weapons.
* This resulted in the formation of the Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics, chaired by Nishina, that met 10 times between July 1942 and March 1943.
* It concluded in a report that while an atomic bomb was, in principle, feasible, "it would probably be difficult even for the
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