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Why China Is Worried About Japan's Plutonium Stocks
Lasrick (2629253) writes A fascinating account of why China is so worried about Japan's excessive plutonium stocks: combined with its highly sophisticated missile program, "Chinese nuclear-weapons specialists emphasize that Japan has everything technically needed to make nuclear weapons." It turns out that Japan has under-reported a sizable amount of plutonium, and there have been increasing signs that the country might be moving toward re-militarization. This is a particularly worrying read about nuclear tensions in Asia.
Not too worried about Japan... I wouldn't cut off their fuel supply however.
If I had a dollar for every thing that China is "worried" about, I would be posting this from my own private island.
China worried about the logical consequences of its own provocations against Japan as well as failing to heel those of North Korea (who essentially only China has open lines of communication).
Do they actually think Japan... of all the countries in the world... would actually build a nuclear weapon, much less use it?
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Just sign a treating promising to protect them if they give up nukes.... It worked great for Ukraine. Based on history, China and the USA should sign promising to protect them.
At the request of the international community they'll stop sticking harpoons in whales, but the request didn't mention anything about nuking the whales.
I'd be worried too if a country who had invaded mine in living history, was under-reporting plutonium.
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Japan has been a de facto nuclear power for decades. They have have the fuel, technology and delivery systems to become a substantial nuclear power in less then a year if they decide to go that route.
Japan lives in a dangerous neighborhood, China is an expansive power making threats in the South China Sea, and the Obama Administration has proven feckless at supporting allies (see also: Ukraine, Iraq).
The fact that nuclear weapons offend the tender sensibilities of Western liberals doesn't enter into their political calculations.
This is one reason why everyone is worried about China's military assertiveness lately. It is not just because of the threat China poses, but the greater threat of a military Japan. Historically Japan kicks China's butt in military contests. Then, in the case of WWII, Japan careens out of control. Don't be a bully China if you don't want to get bloodied.
The trouble is that making nuclear bombs is mid 1940s technology.
Not only that, but medium range ballisistic missiles are also mid 1940s tech.
The main difficulty is that currently enrighment facilities are large and easy to spot provided a country doesn't already have a vibrant reprocessing industry (necessary for efficient use of nuclear fuels).
Many of the things useful for figuring out how to make both of those (e.g. computer simulations, high speed measuring equipment) are nor vastly more advanced and cheaper, the physics is better understood and the basic research is done and dusted.
Pertty much any highly industrialised nation could easily develop nukes and an almost unstoppable delivery system if they wanted to, provided no one threatened them enough to make them stop.
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The idea that Japan could enrich plutonium and turn it into nuclear weapons, which China is trying to push here, is full of "mights". Their logic is essentially:
- Japan didn't report 640kg of Mixed Oxide Fuel in an offline reactor because they didn't believe they had to. MOX is useless for making nuclear weapons by itself without further processing.
- Plutonium can be extracted from MOX, and Japan is doing this, but they reported all of the plutonium they extracted from MOX to the IAEA.
- Japan has a surplus stock of plutonium that they're not really supposed to have, but this is understandable given that plutonium is probably a pain to move around, and they have plans to use it as fuel in breeder reactors in the future.
- Japan has shown no inclination to produce nuclear weapons outside of a few studies, all of which are well over a decade old and have been known about for years.
- In China's mind, all of these things, which are circumstantial at best, indicate that Japan MIGHT be considering the production of nuclear weapons.
From what it sounds like, Japan could've had nuclear weapons years ago if they really wanted to. China merely doesn't want them to have the capability because it means they'd have a much harder time bullying Japan over things like the Senkaku islands.
They have nuclear power plants... and all the industry to make nuclear bombs and missiles.
It is quite likely they have a few that they don't talk about just as Israel has a few they don't talk about. And while we're at it, South Korea probably has a couple as well.
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An enemy might sucker punch us or be so pitiful that we don't feel it sporting to slaughter them to a man... but we are stronger. And we shall remain stronger for generations to come. Too many generations came before that planned for wars and conquests for the fruits of that effort to be be gone so quickly.
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One does not accidentally under-report plutonium stocks, much less Japan, a country known for preciseness. But then of course you would happily bash China as a knee-jerk reaction, for when hell does break loose, it's China again who absorbs the most amount of damage.
Given that the Ukraine situation has just given the world an example of what nuclear-capable allies do when a nuclear-capable country invades a country without that capability (which is essentially to finger-wag and frown at the invader), could anyone really blame Japan if they did opt to arm themselves?
If I had a dollar for every thing that China is "worried" about, I would be posting this from my own private island.
Hopefully, not the Senkakus.
It's been known for years now that Japan and Germany are "nuclear-capable" nations. They have everything they need to start a nuclear program, and could probably get there in a year if they wanted to.
Up to now, they haven't wanted to. Japan, however, is threatened by not one but two nuclear-armed nations. China is looking to expand everywhere, and is particularly ready to fight over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands (brief aside: if you look at them on a map, they're closest to Taiwan - let's give it to them and piss both China and Japan off, if they can't find a way to just share the oil). And then there's North Korea, which has practically made a cult out of hating America and Japan, and has been lobbing missiles towards Japan just to get attention. They haven't been stupid enough to actually attack them yet, but I certainly can't fault Japan for getting concerned about it.
It's not really much plutonium. Sure, you can make about 40 city-sized Fat Man bombs out of it, but the scale is kind of pointless now: with a little hydrogen, you can turn a 14kg bomb up to eleven, and get yields that could blow up half of Japan instead of one small city.
So, Japan can make 40 bombs. If Japan had only 20kg of plutonium, it could still make 3 or 4 devastating small warheads with fusion-boosted-fission, enough to blow holes in Russia or devastate the United States.
If you think that's unrealistic, take a crash course in nuclear weapons. Fat Man had 14,000 grams of plutonium; it converted less that 1 gram into energy before the plutonium core blew apart. A fission-boosted-fusion bomb uses that explosion to trigger nuclear fusion in a second stage, which provides compressive force to hold the core together: the plutonium ball that burns a gram and blows apart now gets crushed together. With the right structure, you can burn 100 grams of the fuel, making the bomb 100 times bigger. A 1kg bomb would still be 7 times bigger than the 14kg Fat Man bomb.
Some serious upgrades have been made to nuclear weapons. They're largely conventional explosive, with a little nuclear core; some are boosted with fusion, which sometimes has startling effects--once, they had a blast go off 100 times bigger than the models projected.
Nuclear weapons are devastating. A handful of nuclear fuel is an arsenal. When you start getting into truckloads of fissile material, you're just wasting effort.
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Well there is the possiblility that Japan sold the plutionium. (seem suicidal but stranger things have happened)
I would expect Japan to re-militarize. With China ever increasingly flexing its military power in the region it might be good to have a strong military in Japan. And notice it is the Chinese who are worried more then anyone else.
Japan has had the technical know-how to build nuclear weapons since the 1970s, certainly.
The concern China expresses over the Japanese nuclear program is precisely the same concern a bully expresses when some local kid starts taking karate lessons.
My main concern is that this may motivate the Chinese to increase their timetable for local seizure of various contested properties, in order to establish them as Chinese by fait accompli before Japan actually nuclearises and freezes the situation into a status quo. Of course, that would only increase Japan's motivation to militarize..
A vicious cycle indeed; unfortunately, to expect China to behave toward its neighbors as anything other than Fascist Italy is apparently unrealistic.
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Japan knew it has lost and All it could hope was make cost of victory high enough for US agree to reasonable peace terms through soviet mediation. And keep some of its empire on continent. However as soon as soviet declared war on Japan there was imminent risk of loosing Japanese Nuclear weapons program to soviet hands AND invasion and annexation of more Japanese territory by soviets who Japanese knew where willing to sacrifice lots of men in order to achieve their goals.
Nuclear bombs where not decisive but they came about time in which situation changed for Japanese from poor to terrible. And for effect of nuclear bombs there where not many targets available anymore to use them, conventional bombing had dealt with cities already.
Now here's a question IF soviets would of kept their non-aggression pact, then could Japan hold out for a year so that their Manhattan project in North Korea could of resulted some real counter bomb, especially with combined with V2 rockets Japanese got From Germans before their surrender. Lets say Japanese puts one V2 with fatman sized bomb in middle of invasion fleet, and then asks USA for status quo ante bellum, I think they could of gotten that. They could bluff that they have nuclear V2:s on submarines Waiting to revenge Nagasakin on continental USA.
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It is pretty obvious that there a numerous developed nations in the world which are capable of producing nuclear weapons in a rather short time period. These countries include at least Japan, Sweden and Finland. They have the know-how, the ingredients and other resources required for developing a nuclear weapon. All it requires is the political will and the absolute need of such a weapon.
If I were Japan or any country in Europe, I would be arming my country to the teeth. Just look at what happened when Russia decided it wanted to take a bite out of Ukraine. Obama's sanctions against Russia aren't going to protect your countries. Look at Obama's response to China invading Vietnam.
No time travel jokes so far?
So say we all
Japan was already suing for peace.
No, Imperial Japan was not suing for peace. A few diplomats were quietly floating the idea with Russia and living in complete fear that they would be discovered by the military and summarily executed for doing so. Even when the Emperor had decided to surrender and recorded a surrender message for the country elements of the military attacked the Imperial Palace to capture and destroy that recording and to "rescue" the emperor from the politicians who were leading him "astray".
"as many as one thousand officers raided the Imperial palace on the evening of August 14, to destroy the recording. The rebels were confused by the layout of the Imperial palace and were unable to find the recording, which had been hidden in a pile of documents. The recording was successfully smuggled out of the palace in a laundry basket of women's underwear and broadcast the following day, although another attempt was made to stop it from being played at the radio station."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
The majority of the Imperial Japanese leadership would only consider an armistice, a peace treaty, like that of WW1 (1919) that would leave Imperial Japanese leadership intact and the home islands unoccupied.
They had run out of bombs, and the kamikaze were coming because they had no fuel to get back to Japan; die in the ocean, or die smashing your plane into a military target.
No. Weapons and ammunition had been stockpiled. This included kamikaze aircraft and boats. Also Kamikazes took off with the full knowledge of and the intent to crash their aircraft into their target.
The arguments around this drift over time. A lot of veterans have started telling me Japan was ready to drop plague-infested fleas on America. They'd hit California, and it would wipe out the entire nation. They've already tested them on China, and it worked. ... except China wasn't wiped out, and Japan could never reach California.
The test in China was a limited test. They bombed a couple of villages and sent doctors in to examine the results. The tests included the use of a ceramic bomb casing that fractured and dispersed fleas using a very small charge that allowed most of the fleas to survive. Imperial Japan had successfully, although ineffectively, attacked the US pacific coast with balloons that drifted across the Pacific and dropped incendiary bombs. However the real plan regarding the fleas was to use submarine based aircraft. Yes, submarine based. Imperial Japan developed and built several submarines with a waterproof compartment on top that could house two or three aircraft. They were technological marvels that the US captured, studied, and sunk to avoid having to share them with the Russians.
The whole story paints a narrative where varied analysis tells you that either it's made-up completely, or Japan has a weapon that kills as many people as a conventional drop-bomb.
"This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread bubonic plague.[28] Some of these bombs were designed with ceramic (porcelain) shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938. These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and other deadly pathogens." ...The I-400-class was designed with the range to travel anywhere in the world and return"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... "They were submarine aircraft carriers able to carry three Aichi M6A Seiran aircraft underwater to their destinations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
The truth is
.I love the way Japan's Defense Force isn't really an army/navy/airforce through clever use of terminology. Take this aircraft carrier^H^H^H^H destroyer for example...
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And really, 640 kg of unused plutonium ought to be enough for anybody.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Pu-240 is only a serious concern in the gun-barrel design. Pretty much everything since Little Boy (and everything before, actually) was/is of an implosion design.
It's also worth noting that Okinawa was not nearly as bloody as it should have been because, if I recally correctly, one division ended up performing a banzai charge and got itself wiped out. Had it not performed said banzai charge it would have been capable of inflicting even further US casualties at Okinawa.
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Reminds me of the US bat fire bombs that were supposed to be dropped on Japan. Basically, bats were outfitted with tiny incendiary devices. They were loaded into compartments on trays. The trays were loaded into a special bomb casing. When the bomb dropped, a parachute deployed, and the trays were lowered. The bats would fly off and find nice quiet spots to roost: attics, eaves, etc. When the time delay on the incendiary device expired, dozens of fires would be started. Because they would be in relatively inaccessible places the fire would have ample time to spread before being noticed.
Unfortunately, during one of the tests, several bats got loose and nestled in the attics and eaves of several of the buildings around the airfield (including a fuel depot), and burned them to the ground.
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Probably depends on what you measure.
Are we talking about the mass of Pu that was fissioned into other elements, or are we talking about the mass of Pu that was converted into energy? If you add up the mass of the fission products in a nuclear bomb they have less mass than what you start out with, because the released nuclear binding energy actually has mass. It is just E=mc^2 - in theory it works for any kind of energy-releasing reaction but when you get to nuclear warheads the masses actually become something measured in the same kinds of units you use on cans in the grocery store.
So, the mass of Pu that was converted to energy is much less than the mass of Pu that was fissioned.
Who are they?
Russia - yeah, they have nukes and are armed, but everyone knows that in their Soviet incarnation, their main objective was the West. Yeah, they had a rivalry w/ China during the Cold War, but after that ended, China & Russia have been a de-facto bloc, agreeing on everything, whether it's support for Syria or Iran, opposition to Islamic Jihadis on their borders & so on.
Mongolia - has never been a threat to China since the Khanates; if anything, it's been the other way around in the last few centuries. Mongolia in fact embraced Russia so that the latter could keep them independent from China
North Korea - yeah, they have nukes, but they've always been a vassal of Beijing. Since when do countries feel threatened by their friends having nukes?
South Korea - yeah, they have US troops there, no nukes, and those troops are there to stop the Kims from walking into Seoul. Not there to take a stroll to Beijing or skate over the Great wall.
Japan - hasn't been a threat to anyone, but given North Korean posturing, and China backing them, who can blame them if the post WWII restriction on Japan rearming is removed and they decide to arm themselves?
Taiwan - yeah, a real threat to China, whose potential declaration of independence would bring down the Communist regime, given the way Beijing reacts to such moves
Vietnam/Malaysia/Philippines - have dispute w/ China over islands in the South China sea, whose possession would threaten China's very existence
Laos - still in China's orbit.
Myanmar - regime very friendly to China
India - does have nukes, but this was a decade long effort since the 1960s, when China defeated India in a war. India never needed nukes against Pakistan, who they defeated in 1947/65/71/95, but they did recognize that they were at a disadvantage against China, who had conquered Tibet, and could devour Bhutan and Nepal. Nepal now has a pro-Maoist regime, and India, despite its stockpiles, now has a nuclear Pakistan to worry about, not just China.
China does have one genuine threat that I agree w/ them on - the Jihadi threat on their West by the Uyghurs. In the ex Soviet 'stans', the Islamic movement of Turkestan, which is a Jihadi campaign to restore the Timuride empire, is out to topple secular regimes in those countries in order to achieve that. Included in their Jihad is the liberation of Xinxiang, or 'East Turkestan'. This has been a real - as opposed to imagined - cause of worry to Beijing, and has caused them to dilute the Turkic populations there by settling Han Chinese there in huge numbers.
So yeah, China does have real threats. Japan simply ain't one of them. Not unless and until the Chinese totally unleash the North Koreans.
Three or four bombs won't devastate a continent. The tsar bomba, the largest device ever tested at 50MT, had a destructive overpressure radius of ~35km, enough to flatten a capital city, but hardly enough to scare a continent. Plus such large devices are impractical, you have to get a large slow bomber into enemy territory. No, a few dozen half megaton warheads like the W88 but with less precise designs (the W88 is designed to take out missile silos) would be sufficient for MAD.
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Except then they nuke you back...
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Little Boy didn't use plutonium at all. It was U-235 and U-238 for the rest.
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And this is related to the GP's post... how exactly?
Read this page: The REAL Reason America Used Nuclear Weapons Against Japan
General Eisenhower, Admiral Leahy, General MacArthur, General LeMay, and several other high ranking US officers said that the dropping of the US bomb was completely unnecessary. If the US simply allowed the institution of the emperor to stand (which we ended up doing in the end anyway), the Japanese would have agreed to surrender far before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps even before Okinawa. There were two main reasons for dropping the bomb: 1.) To gather data on how to maximize the damage that a nuclear weapon could cause on an urban environment. This would be useful in a hypothetical future war with the USSR. 2.) Racism. Many Americans of the time saw the Japanese as subhuman. We use lab rats in experiments. Why not Japanese?
If you think that's unrealistic, take a crash course in nuclear weapons. Fat Man had 14,000 grams of plutonium; it converted less that 1 gram into energy before the plutonium core blew apart. A fission-boosted-fusion bomb uses that explosion to trigger nuclear fusion in a second stage, which provides compressive force to hold the core together: the plutonium ball that burns a gram and blows apart now gets crushed together.
Um ... this isn't quite right. The stages of development are:
1. Pure fission weapon, like Fat Man. As you say, these are inefficient.
2. Fusion-boosted fission. The fission reaction provides the heat and pressure to cause fusion in a deutirium/tritium mix in the core of the plutonium mass. This doesn't add much to the energy output directly, but it produces a whole lot of high-energy neutrons, which cause additional fission reactions in the plutonium. It's *not* a matter of the fusion reaction providing a compressive force to hold the core together: it just allows a lot more of the plutonium to fission before the whole core blows itself apart
3. A full Teller-Ulam design. This is the two-part device of which you may have been thinking. The first part is, as above, a fusion-boosted fission warhead. The x-rays from this detonation are used to compress and heat a secondary assembly, which consists of an outer U-238 (non-fissile) tamper, an inner lithium-deuteride layer, and a plutonium core. These react in reverse order: the core is compressed and becomes supercritical, undergoing fission; the neutrons from the fission produce tritium from the lithium, which then fuses with the deuterium; and the neutrons from this fusion breed the outer layer of U-238 into fissile Pu-239, which then fissions. The mass and momentum of the heavy outer "tamper" layer, driven inwards by the reaction from the primary assembly, keep the whole thing together long enough for most of the fuel to react.
4. Multi-stage wedding-cake design. You use a two-stage device as above to drive a tertiary stage, like a big version of the secondary stage. In theory, you could string on additional stages after this ... but no one needs a bomb that big.
Somehow I get the feeling China is creating there own problem in their push to regional dominance through provocations.
General Eisenhower, Admiral Leahy, General MacArthur, General LeMay, and several other high ranking US officers said that the dropping of the US bomb was completely unnecessary.
The perspective one has at the time the decision was made, with Okinawa fresh in one's mind, and one has after occupation and boots on the ground inspecting the enemy's documents and preparations and interviewing its leadership are two very different things. The comments by the above are often made decades after the war, one in particular admits "I arrived at this conclusion after talking with a number of Japanese officials who had been closely associated with the decision of the then Japanese government, to reject the ultimatum, as it was presented."
If the US simply allowed the institution of the emperor to stand (which we ended up doing in the end anyway), the Japanese would have agreed to surrender far before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps even before Okinawa.
Note that the Emperor's position in post-war Japan was left open to a degree, more on this at the end of this post.
While the Emperor's safety and symbolic position was permitted to continue after occupation it was done so **after** an investigation into whether the Emperor was responsible for war crimes. We could not have determined the Emperor's status with respect to being a war criminal until after boots on the ground, i.e. after surrender.
Regarding the suggestion of a demonstration. The US had only two bombs and the materials necessary for a third would not be ready for some time. Its not clear if those proposing a demonstration were aware of this. The value of a such a demonstration was speculative, both in its results and its reception. Keep in mind that military and industrial targets that may have been used were already heavily hit by conventional weapons and there was debate as to whether atomic damage could be distinguished from prior convention damage, and whether atomic damage might be interpreted as being much lower than its actual effect due to prior damage. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were on the target list because they were in relatively pristine condition and the damage due to atomic bombing could not be misreported.
Most important of all, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima the Imperial Japanese government refused to surrender and indicated a willingness to fight on.
"After the successful atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, President Truman in a widely broadcast speech, picked up by Japanese news agencies, warned that if Japan failed to accept the terms of the declaration, it could "expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."[7] As a result, Prime Minister Suzuki felt compelled to meet the Japanese press, to whom he reiterated his government's commitment to ignore the Allies' demands and fight on."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
So in reality, at the time of the decision (1) Truman did not know whether the Emperor was a war criminal responsible for the torture and execution of American POWs. (2) Only had two weapons available in the pre-invasion time frame and the value of a demonstration was unknown. (3) Had Okinawa fresh in his memory.
Again, note that after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima the Imperial Japanese government indicated a willingness to fight on.
There were two main reasons for dropping the bomb: 1.) To gather data on how to maximize the damage that a nuclear weapon could cause on an urban environment. This would be useful in a hypothetical future war with the USSR.
Your reference suggests no such thing, unless you are making a very strange interpretation of Halsey's flippant comment about scientists and their toys. While the value of deterring possible Russian aggression was a consideration it was secondary, and as history shows not necessarily an unfounded f
The comments by the above are often made decades after the war, one in particular admits "I arrived at this conclusion after talking with a number of Japanese officials who had been closely associated with the decision of the then Japanese government, to reject the ultimatum, as it was presented."
Yes, some of these quotes are evidence that hindsight is 20/20, but that still counters your claims in your previous post that the Japanese would have continued to fight on. And then there are the quotes like these:
That's right, MacArthur said that if he was asked his opinion at that time he would not have seen a reason to use the bomb.
In this one Eisenhower said that he thought the dropping of the bomb was completely unnecessary as soon as he heard the news.
The actual instrument of surrender said nothing about an investigation into war crimes. In fact, there was no mention of crimes at all. Regarding the Emperor, it said
There was also a tacit agreement along with the final surrender that the Emperor would not under any circumstances be investigated for war crimes:
http://www.pacificwar.org.au/J...
http://www.japanfocus.org/-her...
No, this reference does not suggest it, but it is widely known that Hiroshima was spared conventional bombing so that if it was attacked with a nuclear device, it would be easier to analyze the effects. Since several generals from the previous source said was of limited strategic value, this seems to be the only reason for the bombing Hiroshima over a more militarily significant target, or (if demoralizing the Japanese was the only objective) an unpopulated area.
I do like how China is trying to give a morale lesson while their cyber devision attacks every country out there, destabilising the world in the worst way possible. The means to destroy electronic infrastructure in my own personal opinion is more devastating then destroying physical. It is also good to point out in really basic terms, The guy with the bigger stick is complaining because the guy over there has the means to build a bigger better stick. I would just laugh at this because it obviously shows just how petty China is as a country in general, The fact that Japan has the means and ways to build the biggest arsenal and doesn't proves they have the correct morale compass for now. Mean while China is sat there with a big grin on their facing and the wooden spoon in the bowl. Yes it maybe a true concern but it is hard to take them seriously while they are being the electronic aggressor on every single front compromising both government and private computer systems. I mean ask your self the question what are you more worried about ? the fact China's cyber military could destroy and wipe out all of a water treatment plants in one swift move and then overload the power grids so all of our power infrastructure is rendered useless. Or that Japan "in theory" could make X amount of bombs but chooses not to ? hahaha its a no brainer.
Yes, some of these quotes are evidence that hindsight is 20/20, but that still counters your claims in your previous post that the Japanese would have continued to fight on.
Note that my statement was that **imminent** surrender was a myth. Not eventual surrender. And while the blockade did its work the conventional attacks would continue, casualties would mount on both sides and famine and disease would become increasing threats that could claim many more.
And again, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima the Imperial Japanese Prime Minister public stated to the Japanese press that the government rejects the surrender demand and will fight on. The government in fact never reached any sort of consensus to surrender, it was only the personal decision and intervention of the Emperor that led to surrender. Such intervention is a fluke of history, not something that observers at the time could have predicted. The words and actions of the government were to the contrary, to continue the fight. The notion that imminent surrender was foreseen by some is a myth.
That's right, MacArthur said that if he was asked his opinion at that time he would not have seen a reason to use the bomb.
MacArthur was somewhat unique in that he was willing to give the Emperor a pass on his responsibility for initiating the war and any war crimes that occurred. His opinion on ending the war in weeks was entirely contingent upon making such a concession.
Note that such a concession was not actually made, after the surrender the Emperor was in fact investigated to determine his culpability with respect to initiating the war and with war crimes that occurred. No evidence of his culpability was found. The Imperial Japanese had not in fact received the sort of absolute guarantee that they originally desired.
Some historians say MacArthur helped suppress evidence to get his desired outcome, to ensure an easy occupation and/or as a reward for personally intervening with the government and ordering a surrender.
"Hirohito and all members of the imperial family implicated in the war such as Prince Chichibu, Prince Asaka, Prince Takeda and Prince Higashikuni were exonerated from criminal prosecutions by MacArthur, with the help of Bonner Fellers who allowed the major criminal suspects to coordinate their stories so that the Emperor would be spared from indictment."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
True or not, the fact remains that the Emperor was at risk of indictment for war crimes after the surrender.
All this aside, MacArthur's objection to the atomic bombing was largely moral in nature and to him a blockade seemed more moral than atomic bombing cities. While an interesting point to debate, it is not evidence of imminent surrender.
In this one Eisenhower said that he thought the dropping of the bomb was completely unnecessary as soon as he heard the news.
Also based on morality, also an opinion dependent upon no prosecution of the Emperor.
There was also a tacit agreement along with the final surrender that the Emperor would not under any circumstances be investigated for war crimes
Tacit seems a gross overstatement. More accurate would be a grand conspiracy to destroy evidence on the part of the Japanese and a willingness by MacArthur to cooperate or at least tolerate such efforts. Again to ease occupation and/or to reward the Emperor for his personal intervention to end the war. The Emperor never had the immunity the Imperial government had originally desired, if evidence had survived and been found prosecution of the Emperor was a possibility.
it is widely known that Hiroshima was spared conventional bombing so that if it was attacked with a nuclear device, it would be easier to analyze the effects.
It is erroneously to deduce
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There have been designs for 250MT nuclear bombs. They stopped building bigger bombs because they worked out how to use boosted fission to no practical purpose: a single, small H-Bomb can blow up the state of Colorado in its entirety. This isn't strategically useful.
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China likes bullying. Japan will retaliate with nuclear weapons.
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