Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs stopped Japanese nukes

the Japs were looking to bomb New York, don't you know.

boy are we lucky they didn't.

I mean , they had school boys digging with sandals on, looking for uranium.
no beekers, no lab coats, nothing.

[ride of a lifetime]


checkitout:

New york times- ishikawa Journal
Fukushima’s Long Link to a Dark Nuclear Past
Kazuhiro Yokozeki for The New York Times
Kiwamu Ariga, left, and Kuniteru Maeda, both 81, at the former quarry site where they mined uranium for the imperial army.
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: September 5, 2011
ISHIKAWA, Japan — Kiwamu Ariga skirted the paddies of ripening rice, moving briskly despite his 81 years to reach a pile of yellowish rocks at the foot of a steep, forested hillside.
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Japanese Find Radioactivity on Their Own (August 1, 2011)
The New York Times
Ishikawa is 36 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
It was here that, as a junior high school student in the final months of World War II, Mr. Ariga and his classmates were put to work hacking rocks out of the hill’s then exposed stone face until the blood ran from their sandaled feet. The soldiers told them nothing beyond instructing them to look for stones with brown or black spots.
Then one day, Mr. Ariga recalled, an officer finally explained what they were after: “With the stones that you boys are digging up, we can make a bomb the size of a matchbox that will destroy all of New York.” Mr. Ariga said he did not learn other details of Japan’s secrecy-wrapped efforts to build an atomic bomb until years after the war.
“We had no idea what we were doing here, in our bare feet, digging out radioactive uranium,” Mr. Ariga said, standing between cedar saplings as spindly as his aging legs. “Now, 66 years later, we are exposed to radiation again.”
This quiet mining town, nestled amid gentle green mountains, is located in Fukushima Prefecture, the rural district that is home to the radiation-spewing nuclear plant that bears its name, just an hour’s drive over mountains to the northeast. The accident five months ago has prompted aging residents like Mr. Arigato speak out about how Fukushima, a name that has now become synonymous with civilian nuclear disaster, also has an older, lesser-known link to an even darker side of atomic energy.
... During the war, he said, generals and admirals believed their own propaganda about Japan being a sacred country that could defeat its foes with spiritual purity alone, and thus allowed themselves to fall behind the United States in the race to build the bomb. Now, he said, the Fukushima Daiichi accident exposed how Japan had let itself be led astray once again, this time by economic planners who promoted a “safety myth” that Japanese technology could never fail.