This is the only thing in the article I would take issue with. Japan really had no program in place. As far as I know, a few Japanese intellectuals had theorized about the bomb, and uranium deposits were available in Manchuria. But there was certainly nothing that could be described as "furiously driven", and nothing remotely resembling the scale of the Manhattan Project. The odd thing is, the Japanese did developed almost no new military technology of any kind during the war. The weapons they had at the end of the war were basically the same as those at the beginning, which were more suited to colonial domination than fighting a major power. After we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, those Japanese scientists knew what had hit them, and urged the Emperor to develop them. But American submarines had virtually destroyed the ability to move uranium ore from Manchuria, and in any case it was far too late to start. The second bomb killed the idea.
Germany did make some more substantial efforts in the direction of a nuclear bomb, but again not on the scale needed, and nothing that could be described as "furious". For one thing, Hitler distrusted what he termed "damned Jewish physics", and preferred to see Germany's efforts put into bigger, better tanks, airplanes, submarines, and especially his "wonder weapons" the V1 and V2 rockets. What was done in terms of developing nuclear weapons was on a shoestring, and often went down dead ends. For example, a great deal of the effort was put towards fusion (hydrogen bombs), which first needs a fission bomb to set it off. In any case, allied bombing destroyed most of the facilities, and no major effort was made to build new ones.
Thank you Hugin for your thoughtful reply. However our seperate research seems to have unearthed different results. Here is just one report on Japan’s WWII Nuclear program:
The Japanese atomic program was led by Dr. Yoshio Nishina, who also was a friend of oratory at the Riken (the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research) in 1931 to study high-energy physics. He built his first 26 inch cyclotron in 1936, and another 60 inch 220 ton cyclotron in 1937. In 1938 Japan also purchased a cyclotron from the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1939 Dr. Nishina recognized the military potential of nuclear fission, and was worried that the Americans were working on a nuclear weapon which might be used against Japan. Indeed, in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt started the first investigations into fission weapons in the United States, which eventually evolved into the massive Manhattan Project (the very laboratory from which Japan purchased its own cyclotron would become one of the major sites for weapons research). Dr. Nishina tried to match the U.S. research, and promoted the development of a nuclear weapon. In October 1940,
And on their advanced chemical/biologocal programs conducted by the infamous Unit 731:
The Japanese Army’s Unit 731,conducted Japan’s not-so-secret chemical-biological warfare operation in Manchuria before and during World War II.
Deliberately infected with plague, anthrax, cholera and other pathogens, an estimated 10,000 Chinese civilians and allied prisoners of war were made into human guinea pigs by Unit 731. They were vivisected without anesthesia and then dispatched by lethal injection. Other experiments involved tying victims to stakes and bombarding them with shrapnel laced with gangrene; inserting them in pressure chambers to see how much their bodies could take before their eyes popped; and exposing them, periodically drenched in water, to subzero weather to determine their susceptibility to frostbite. Three large incinerators disposed of the
corpses, which burned quickly because the internal organs had been removed.
Beyond the torture chambers of Unit 731, which occupied a
six-square-kilometer base that rivaled Auschwitz-Birkenau in size, the Japanese Army conducted germ-warfare field tests not only against nearby Chinese and Russian territory but as far away as Burma, Thailand and Indonesia. The death toll may have run as high as 200,000.
American occupation authorities in Japan, who after the war gave Ishii immunity from war crimes prosecution, were astounded by the scope of an operation that, in addition to producing lethal pathogens, manufactured 20 million doses of vaccine each year at just one facility.
Much of what you say of the German operations are basically true, but they did nonetheless have a continuous, if somewhat sporatic and diffused program on nuclear resarch throughout the war years, including the construction of some pretty major heavy water operations, the magnitude of which were not discovered until after the war had ended.
I will agree with your criticism of my use of the phrase “furiously driven” as probably not being the most appropriate description of their often confused efforts. But the programs were in place and were working toward their goal of nuclear weaponry. We just did it bigger and better. Thank God.