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Japan Navy intended nuclear attack on U.S., says physicist

TOKYO -- The Japanese Navy planned to build a nuclear warhead for an attack on the United States after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by atomic bombs, a Japanese scientist said Thursday.

Prof. Emiritus Tsunesaburo Asada of Osaka University said the plan was never implemented because Emperer Hirohito announced the end of the war the next day.

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Following the end of the war, the Japanese government declared it would never build nuclear weapons and renounced all forms of military agression.

But Asada, 82, told United Press International in a telephone interview that on Aug. 14, 1945, the day before the Japanese surrender, Vice Adm. Ryutaro Shibuya assembled all the Japanese physicists attached to the navy in Tokyo.

'We must make an atomic bomb in six months and drop it on the U.S. mainland,' Asada quoted Shibuya as telling a stunned audience of around 60, which included senior naval officers.

Shibuya proposed that the secret nuclear research lab would be set up in a cave in Nagano Prefecture, on the hills 200 miles northeast of Tokyo.

Asada said he has heard that Shibuya is still alive today but the former naval officer's whereabouts is unknown.

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On Aug. 6, eight days before Shibuya's speech, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and another one on Nagasaki three days later to clinch the Allies victory.

Shibuya 'apparently was not told the government had already decided the previous day to accept the Allied Forces' demand for an unconditional surrender,' Asada said.

Asada, who was then a physics professor at the Imperial Osaka University, had been assigned by the navy to survey bomb damage in Hiroshima and had just returned to make a witness account of the devastation.

A two-hour heated discussion by the naval officers and scientists followed Asada's grim report. 'Then, Shibuya suddenly stood up and ordered the launching of a crash program to produce atomic bombs,' Asada said in a rasping voice.

'I tried to tell him that it can't done,' the physicist said.

'At that stage in the war, we even didn't have airplanes to drop atomic bombs if one was created,' not to mention technology, Asada added.

But Shibuya shouted back: 'To challenge the impossible -- that's where the strength of our forces lie.'

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