Born a few weeks before the outbreak of World War 1I, I was six years old when the Enola Gay dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. A child of the atomic age, my nickname at East Kew Primary was Adam Bomb.
Talking to Ray Monk about his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical phycisist known as “the father of the atomic bomb”, my memories came rushing back. Including the memory of something Japan has preferred to forget, and wants the world to forget: the inconvenient truth that Japan, as well as the US and Germany, was working on the A Bomb. How do I know this? Because a bloke called Teddy Conant told me.
Here’s the essence of the story. As a child, Ted was bounced on Einstein’s knee. His father, James B. Conant, held many senior positions in US academic, military and diplomatic life, including the presidency of Harvard and as his country’s first ambassador to West Germany. Having worked on the grim science of poison gas he would, years later, play a key role in the Manhattan Project. Conant witnessed the first Trinity detonation and was a member of the committee that advised President Harry Truman to bomb Hiroshima. Later, from a change of heart, he would oppose the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Forty years ago Conant’s son Teddy, who looked eerily like Jerry Lewis’s nutty professor, was working for me – heading a team refining a unique Australian 3D system for film and television. Kerry Packer was our financier. We had R&D teams working in five cities. We were flying to visit technicians in Tokyo when Teddy dropped the metaphoric bombshell – quite casually informing us that the Japanese had been working on the bomb. I was incredulous, disbelieving. This was unknown to the wider world – and to those of us who regarded the US bombings as war crimes.
On our arrival, Teddy introduced me to an ex-journalist friend who had been researching Japan’s secret nuclear program for a book that was never published. He played us wire recordings of interviews with Japanese scientists who confessed their involvement, even though the program hadn’t been wildly successful. I heard him ask an ancient Japanese general the question, “Would you have used it?” The answer was chilling in its simplicity. After a laugh, “Of course!”
This changes nothing and everything.
Critics of the decision to bomb Japanese cities argue that that it did not hasten the end of the war (Japan was already defeated), that the atom bomb should have been demonstrated to the world in the desert rather than deployed, and that its real purpose was to frighten the USSR – to effectively declare the Cold War.
What seems clear to me is that the fact of a Japanese nuclear project at very least changes perceptions about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet nobody knows about it, least of all in modern Japan. Those who did know about it are long dead. Including my friend Teddy. But it’s part of the story of Oppenheimer, now being retold in Christopher Nolan’s film epic.
The nuclear club has nine sovereign members, with almost 13,000 nuclear weapons in the global stockpile. The Doomsday Clock is back at seconds to midnight … lest we forget.
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