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The Japanese began their efforts to build an atomic bomb in 1940. The principal facility was at the Riken lab in Tokyo. The German efforts, of course, were the original reason the US began the Manhattan project, which was not even conceived until October, 1939 when Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein sent Roosevelt a letter warning that the Nazis were working on an Atomic device.

Recent articles have suggested that the Japanese were "nearly" finished with their design by August 1945, although the mainstream assessment is that they were some years away from actually building a weapon, due to shortages in money and raw materials.

The United States simply won the race, but there were always 3 entrants. Despite the lack of nuclear weapons, the Japanese were busy deploying biological and chemical agents against the Chinese. As early as 1936, Unit 731 was using pathogens in Ningpo. Poison gas was used just a little later, at Wusung in 1937. They were working on three modes of WMD and using two.

I will not bore you with a recitation of the horrors of the Nanking massacre, which by the way, killed more people (300,000) than both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Suffice it to say, that by 1945, some 50,000 Chinese civilians were being killed per month by the Japanese Army. The number of Chinese civilians who would have been killed between Fat Man and the proposed 'Olympic' would have been greater than half a million.

I guess you are right. Weapons of mass destruction have been used before: against the Chinese; by a country which still hasn't acknowledged it.