Japan Developed an Atomic Bomb in WW2. It Laid the Groundwork for North Korea’s Nuclear Program

Japan’s WWII development of a nuclear program is not universally known. But after decades of research into national intelligence archives both in the US and abroad, today’s guest Robert Wilcox builds on his earlier accounts and provides the most detailed account available of the creation of Japan’s version of our own Manhattan Project—from the project’s inception before America’s entry into WWII, to the possible detonation of a nuclear device in 1945 in present-day North Korea.

Wilcox, the author of Japan’s Secret War, weaves a portrait of the secret giant industrial complex in northern Korea where Japan’s atomic research and testing culminated. And it is there that North Korea, following the Japanese defeat, salvaged what remained of the complex and fashioned its own nuclear program. This program puts not only Japan but also its allies, including the US, in jeopardy.

Machine-Generated Transcript

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Scott Rank 0:12
History isn’t just a bunch of names and dates and facts. It’s the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here. Welcome to the history unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is. I’m your host, Scott rank. When it comes to World War Two technology, the country that most people focus on is Germany. Its tanks and its fighters were superior to those the United States at the beginning of the war, and there was a lot of development on secret weapons programs that still and treat people today and a lot know that they’re also fairly well advanced and far along in a nuclear weapons program. Operation Paperclip was a program to bring Nazi scientists to the United States after World War Two. Many of them were absolutely critical members of the Apollo program and allow the United States to win the space race. A country that gets less attention in Japan. Most know if they’re into naval history that the early fighters and the naval combat fighters were superior to those of the United States. But after a while, the US beats them technologically. However, what most people don’t know is that Japan developed a nuclear weapons program in World War Two, that not only was advanced, but it was arguably in front of Germany, and they possibly detonated a nuclear device in 1945 and would have been able to use weapons in the war if they would have begun sooner and not that the war would have ended sooner. Today, I’m speaking with Robert Wilcox, who’s author of the book Japan Secret War, how Japan’s raised to build its own atomic bomb provided the groundwork for North Korea’s nuclear program. He first wrote the book in 1985. And this is it’s the addition, work is based on decades of research into National Intelligence archives in the United States in Japan. And he looks at a number of things such as the secret giant industrial complex in North Korea, where Japan’s atomic research and testing culminated how Russia stole a lot of this research and how they arguably helped North Korea get set up with their own program in the late 1940s and 1950s. That didn’t really culminate in anything. But the seeds planted for what came decades later. Rubber mentioned that Japan itself is very interested in this book as their thinking on how to rebuild their military and build up their armaments in the face of Chinese aggression into the South China Sea and possibly become a nuclear nation again. So this is a very interesting account of World War Two that most people don’t think about. So I hope you enjoyed this discussion with Robert Wilcox. Robert, welcome to the show. Thanks a lot, Scott. Glad to be here. Well, I am very fascinated by this topic, because I get a lot of listener questions about World War Two and there’s this mystique about Germany. Technological Development and a lot of their overly complicated weapons, some would call them superweapons. But Japan doesn’t get that same type of focus. And that’s what we’ll be looking at. To start things off. I’m curious about what Japan’s overall level of technology is in the 1940s. Some people mentioned that its fighters were better than what the United States had at the beginning of the war. So I know that little tidbit and I know that Japan pushes an aggressive reform program starting from the mid to third quarter of the 19th century onward. Which brings us to the beginning of World War Two. Where is Japan? If we look at the big picture of aircraft carriers, artillery, manufacturing, and other things? Is it far ahead of the United States on par behind? What do you make of it?

Robert Wilcox 3:46
Well, I’m not an expert on that specific part of it. However, Japan had been at war for 10 years before we took them on and they were there for much More veteran at warfare and how to do it, at least in Asia where they were at war. I would say at the beginning of the war, they were better than us as far as their industrial capacity. That was the whole thing that got Japan out of the Middle Ages. When Perry came and showed up in Japan, he astounded the Japanese, they were sort of in the middle ages and didn’t realize that elsewhere in the world, things were really, really advancing, especially industrially. And so they began a program of becoming an industrial power and after world war one where they were allied with us, and they took over, for instance, as a spoil of war Korea, they began to build a huge industry and they had already done that by that time in Japan itself and then began to move into Asia so that they could exploit the resources there. So at the beginning, of the war, no question. They were a power to be reckoned with. Their Navy alone was terrific. You know, they had built carriers they had built battleships when the war started, they had as outnumbered in that regard and their army was very well trained. It had been victorious in many battles in Asia. And as far as science goes, they realized they had to get with Western science. And they did so they had very top-rated scientists in my story about Japan making an atomic bomb, or trying to there is evidence they did they were all over the world. One of the key scientists in my story was a protege of Einstein worked with him a friend of his Niels Bohr the same so they were building a giant industry and keep in my story is Korea where they had unknown basically To the west, although it became known as the war went on, they had built a giant industrial complex all along the shoreline of Korea and into those mountains which we eventually encountered at the Chosun reservoir. All those things were built by Japan. So, in a nutshell, they were quite formidable as an industrial and growing power and especially as a warfighting power at that time,

Scott Rank 6:31
right from the late 1800s onwards, the non-Western world looks at Japan as a model of reform of taking the fruits of Western ism in their mind of science of technological advancement of military success, without having to take on other aspects of Western ism that they didn’t want to like religion or different types of philosophy, which Japan didn’t. And I wonder before we get into the particulars of Japan’s atomic weapons program. There’s been a lot of research and analysis of Germany’s nuclear weapons program. But Japan hasn’t been a part of that. Do you think it’s because Japan wasn’t considered this technological powerhouse like Germany was or it’s just simply not known as well? Why do you think this part of Japan’s history isn’t discussed?

Robert Wilcox 7:19
Well, the simple answer is that there in the mysterious east, we looked at the West and figured the West was better and this was stupid. They were doing their own and we’re very comparable by the way the Germans and the Japanese worked together. In this Japanese atomic bomb program. They weren’t an arm and arm there was a lot of subterfuge and so on, but they both knew and both were working on an atomic bomb and they helped each other sometimes almost with pulling your arm to do it. But they did do that. One of the big stories in my book is how the last submarine leaving From Germany from Kiel, Germany, literally as Germany is capitulating and dying at the end of the war, it has on it uranium bound for Japan, one of the problems for Japan was finding your right not finding uranium, but finding it and processing it and so on, and is still a mystery about what happened there. But they work together much more than we know. And and and another simple answer is just simple prejudice. We just didn’t think the Japanese could do this. They were just not regarded as up to the task as we are. And you have to remember that there are different ways to make atomic weapons and not everybody doesn’t have to follow our way. And that’s what we ran into at the end of the war when we found out what they had done.

Scott Rank 8:53
Right. I mean, America’s approach to the Manhattan Project was a tremendous industrial poach with multiple laboratories. But let’s stick with Japan. And I’m curious, could you walk me through? What is Japan’s research program? Like? Can you describe its origin from when research scientists know that this is theoretically possible and begin setting up their own programs and Germany in the United States, Japan and elsewhere? So what are its origins in Japan and how does it develop?

Robert Wilcox 9:23
Well, Japan was right on at the same time, all the rest of the world powers were when it was discovered in Germany that nuclear fission could make a bomb, they knew it. And early on, even before they attacked us, they began looking for uranium. And that was their idea. They realized that an atomic bomb could be made and it would be a big weapon, but when they went into war with us, they didn’t think the war would last long enough to make one. So it was kind of a low priority at that time, you know, the same This model called the Saturnian model of the atom with, with those planets rotating around it are those minor you know, tiny, minuscule, I think that was first proposed by a, a Japanese physicist Nagasaki, I think his name was. So they knew about all of this when they knew what was coming. But when the war started, they didn’t even think they’d have to make a bomb to win the war. Their main idea was to give us the big punch in the nose hurt us badly, which they did at Pearl Harbor, although that was really the turning point in the war because it made us come back as hard as we could no matter what, they figured the ward be over early. So it was a low priority even before Pearl Harbor. The Japanese general who was in charge of this kind of thing he called his people in and he said, let’s see if we can make a bomb and they did. To begin to look at it in a pilot program, but not much really thinking they were ever going to use it at that time.

Scott Rank 11:10
What was their approach? Was it similar to the United States where you have a massive investment of resources and multiple laboratories working in coordination? Is it more like Germany where there are different labs? They’re not necessarily on the same page? Is it something different than those two?

Robert Wilcox 11:29
I know that you know, they’re their main, the main difference was that Japan is a little country and they could not. They didn’t have a lot of fissionable material in Japan proper, although we still don’t really know the truth about that. But anyway, they didn’t. And so let me tell you that Japan had a program just like the Manhattan Project when they decided to go full guns with it, but it wasn’t within their borders and That was a big difference. They had to go over to Asia in their occupied areas. And even before the war, they had started to look for uranium and uranium was big for a while, as far as they were looking, but if you know there are other elements like thorium and those kinds of things, which can be used to make a bomb with but at the beginning of the war, it was they had search parties out and they had huge diggings thousands of coolies and Japanese monitoring them and so on, to dig all this stuff out. But they had to bring it back in the waters back to Japan where we’re supposedly or at least in the beginning, that’s where the project was headed, was was, was headquartered. So they had, they actually had a program in China. They had a program in Manchuria and a program in Japan everything being run from China. Japan. But it was parceled out like we would send our we would go to Oak Ridge for certain things and we would go to Washington State, they’d have to go to Shanghai and they’d have to go elsewhere. So they had that problem. As the war continued, and it became more of a priority object. This hurts them in their ships were sunk. We’re bringing back orders and so on. And at the very end of the war, well, let’s say early 1945, when they began when America began to bomb Japan, everything all of the pilot programs for Japan and you know, this was really an engineering problem. The physics was known. Joshua Nishan was his who was one of the pilot program scientists, he’s a world-renowned he was a top physicist. He knew how to make a bomb. It was getting the materials and then and then engineering it and, and once a Japan was under our bombing attack daily, they moved the pilots they had already engineered separators you needed separators to separate raw uranium into the fissionable element the U 235. And they moved it over and and and other they were doing other things as well. You know you can, you can use thorium it’s not as we tried to use thorium in the 50s but it didn’t. We just decided to stick with uranium because it was you could the thorium is is more doubtful and you could have an explosion while you’re working with it and so on. They moved it over to Korea. And this was one of the big things that I found out that nobody had ever, you know, at the end of the war we finally went when we intercepted that, that that submarine and that’s what happened to that submarine that was bringing uranium to Japan. They already had it but this was I think,

separated uranium it was a fissionable uranium and I think when they intercepted that we did America did it we finally realized that hey, we never thought the Japanese were doing anything but wait a minute. What is this submarine this German submarine bound for? For Tokyo with all this, this uranium on it we better check it out. And so we ordered we hastily organized what was called the atomic bomb mission and went into Japan. We still didn’t uncover much of anything the Japanese lied through their teeth and understandably they had just suffered the the the bombing, you know, the first atomic bombing and seen what it did and they didn’t want their people to know that they had done it too and, and I’m getting a little ahead of myself but right after that why we have beaten Japan and we need Japan as an ally against Russia. So we said sure, we’re not going to tell anybody what you did. That’s fine. It’ll all be top secret. You keep your secret you help us. We just need you as a jumping-off point but so they’re, they’re proud their project ultimately, was just as successful in terms of, of pies, sending things out to other smaller pilot programs developing separators in order to separate the uranium and also other machinery, and they moved it over to Korea, and Korea was literally unknown to us we didn’t we weren’t even bombing Korea during the war Oh, there was some minor little things and they had this huge industrial power over therewith, with with with more electrical power than you could ever imagine it was through that Chosun reservoir, power plants. And that’s whereas the as the war got worse for Japan, the atomic bomb project that they had became higher and higher and priority until it was finally they know, in the, in the beginning, they had hoped they could maybe use a bomb against us and bring it over by a bomber. Well, that was out of the question. But they knew they were going to be invaded. They were That’s when it became a top priority. They were going to use it on the fleet when it came in and they were going to put it on submarines or surface ships and move it out there. That’s a pretty long-winded explanation. But they had the same kind of probe program we did. It was just in a different way. It was out in Asia, pieces of it. Were working and in the end, we know that they had a project that in Manchuria that may have been just as big but you know, the Russians came in at the end of the war. If you couldn’t if you recall this and took over Japan, I believe we took over excuse me, Korea, I believe they were much closer to this. They knew that the Japanese main plants were in Korea where In my book, you will see, it has been reported many times some top secret that they actually exploded a bomb too late, too late, the Russians came in, and they never could use it. But that’s where they ended up. And that was where we didn’t have a clue about what was going on until after the war.

Scott Rank 19:22
I want to come back to this issue of what Japan was planning to do with its nuclear weapons because, for whatever reason, these dark scenarios and alternate histories seem to intrigue people. But do you think that Japan would have been successful?

Robert Wilcox 19:35
I hope you don’t think this is a dark scenario, like a conspiracy theory? Oh, no, no, no. This thing is very documented. It’s all extremely documented. I mean, I got 550 footnotes in here that document everything that’s written in here. This really happened. This is not just an idea that maybe it happened.

Scott Rank 19:56
Oh, yeah, I get that. I’m more curious about it. Had armed a fleet of bombers? We’ll get back to that in a second. But one question I have is, from what I understand of Germany’s program, and I’ll probably get out of my depth here very quickly, is that from refining uranium into weapons-grade uranium, I think Germany had a problem where they assumed it would take an enormous amount of a successful bomb. Whereas the United States did you refine uranium, but also refined plutonium. And that was a factor that helped it be successful, and I’m probably getting something wrong here. But from what you can tell Japan, were they on the right track and had their industrial military complex not been destroyed. Do you think they would have succeeded where Germany did not succeed?

Robert Wilcox 20:46
Yes, I absolutely do. I believe that they actually made a bomb. And it was, this isn’t just me. I mean, there are reports from our intelligence and so on that, they made a bomb and exploded it. It was You know, a test bomb off the coast of Korea. And if the war hadn’t ended right then which it did this was on August 10 that they did this and there’s much confirmation of this. You have to go into deep deep secret stuff that nobody knew about or that that wasn’t available at the end of the war. It took someone to dig it out there were little blurbs about it. But anyway, they made a bomb. There are also and I’m not an expert on on on Germany. Let me tell you, it’s so I’ve spent decades in Japan and I don’t even speak the language. It’s very, very tough. But there’s a lot more to be learned about what Germany did. I have seen myself, top-secret reports which are very valid. reports that they that the Germans themselves, developed some sorts of smaller nuclear bombs up in the north, and there are they used concentration camp victims and so on and fired off a couple of these. They were much more developed than we generally know. If you go and dig into it, you will find this out. But Germany is not my area I actually worked with my assistant, I’ve kept telling him to write a book about Germany because he knows a lot about this. That’s his particular interest. And there’s a lot more to be learned about Germany, but there’s more to be learned about what Japan did but my book absolutely puts to rest the idea that they didn’t go very far that they didn’t know very much they got right The edge there. There’s very good evidence they fired off a test bomb in the sea next to Korea, but the Russians came in, they took over North Korea. They kept everyone out even to the point of shooting down American plains. And for three years they looted all of the plants that the Japanese had. And as you know, the Russians are the next to have the atomic bomb and while they had spies in our plants, they also had the Russian plants and there’s no question in my mind. And the book I think clearly doesn’t just say that it proves it. They took a lot from the Japanese plants and eventually When, when they were done in 1948, the Russians gave the plants back to North Korea. And that is the beginning of the North Korean nuclear program which threatens us in the world today. And there’s no question about that the three big scientists who have heralded in North Korea all start at Conan Korea hung on Korea today, which is where the Japanese plants were. So there’s a real continuum here. And the only thing left to do is to actually I don’t know go find the broken parts of the bomb there on that, on that score, but

for us wrote two other editions of this earlier when I got on to this. I mean, this has been a long, long time study and the Japanese would not publish them. They just published with the publication of this one Japan Secret War, the third edition, they published this one because a Japanese general called me and he said we didn’t believe what you had written the first two times, but you’ve proved it to us now. And you know, Japan is trying to get to take its reigns back and get away from America being our their protector and protect themselves and go nuclear again. And the book is doing quite well in Japan because it’s opening the eyes. It had been, you know, that was one of the biggest secrets of the war, that Japan had this bomb, tried to make it because they have always been looked at as a solely the victim of the bomb and it’s in both their interest to keep that grip because they’ve gained so much from that they were purely the victims and nothing else. But the fact is, they tried hard and would have used it in a second. Had they been able had the Russians not come in? Well had the war not ended, we beat them to the punch. That’s basically what happened.

Scott Rank 26:16
You know how big the test bomb was how many kilotons or megatons?

Robert Wilcox 26:22
I don’t this first came right after the war an agent for America. What was it called the CIC or something which was digging into Japan in Asia, David Snell, who became a very respected Newsweek and so on correspondent after the war? He wrote a big story which he met with a Japanese officer who said they had come this far that they had actually test-fired a bomb, and it had been made up in the Chosun reservoir area and then it had been brought down To that, which is about 2030 miles, maybe 50 miles. Those are very, very jagged, do remote mountains. They brought it down to the coast where it actually had been engineered and so on. And it was put on to a, they call it to launch, it was probably a 50-foot type thing and it was puttered out into the middle, maybe 30 miles away from the shore, and then it fired off. I don’t know how big it was, but it wasn’t as big as ours, but it definitely could have devastated a fleet that would have, you know, would have come in and attack Japan. So I don’t know what the size was. What we have are his reports. And then we have after as the war ended, right after an ended, America sent what was called the atomic bomb mission and it was just like the Alsace mission into Germany. They interviewed all the scientists who lied through their teeth and said, Oh no, we didn’t do much. We didn’t do anything. It was eventually realized that they had lied when at first we thought, okay, we can not worry about it. And you remember the incident where all of a sudden, America took all the cyclotrons in Japan, which they had some very big ones that when the war started, they had the largest cyclotron in the world there and threw them all in Tokyo Bay. You may not remember that but it’s that was a big big story. We suddenly realized Wait a minute, they did a lot more than we and then we started looking at Korea where their plants were. And by the Korean War, there were actual and I have all the orders and so on actual missions, by bombers to bomb and destroy Roy, what had become the Russian nuclear plants built on what they had taken from Japan. And this is all documented, it’s all there. So we didn’t know about it we found out about and then there are other smaller stories, many of them I mean, many of them indicating that that had all happened and this general who finally got in touch with me and was instrumental in having the book published. He has located some workers around Conan Perea who remember this. I don’t have those and my books already published, I can’t get that in there. But it’s just part of the continuing story. So I don’t I cannot tell you how big the bomb was. All I can tell you is there are numerous reports that had happened.

Scott Rank 29:55
And then Believe it or not, my audience is interested in historiography and sources and How history gets made. How are you able to learn about this? Were there archives that had been closed off for a few decades after the war that opens and you were able to see this or

Robert Wilcox 30:09
you’re a historian and you, you will very much understand this. I read about the fact, in the New York Times, I’m just a writer. I look for good stories. I had written my first book, I’ve written 12. Now, I had written my first book, I was looking for another book. And I read on the front page of the New York Times that there was the possibility that Japan had tried to make an atomic bomb I don’t remember even right now, what it was, but I really that said to me, wow, that’s a big book that nobody knows this. And oh, yeah, it had to do with a Spanish agent who had worked for the Japanese. His name was Velasco, and anyway, he had said this and some other thing. There was some other stuff. So I just picked up the phone. I don’t remember how I got ahold of this, but I got a hold of one of the Big Yale professors of history and I called him up and I’ll give you his name in a second. I got this terrible that I can’t remember it right now, but I called him up and I said, Is there anything to do with this? Actually I went to see him Derick de sola price, Yale Avalon professor of the history of science, and I went to visit him and he said, you know, something big happened and it’s all been covered up and he said, we have tried meaning he in some of his assistance, have tried and we’re just running into a stone wall but if you go to Japan, you might find out more about it. Well, I did that. I was, I was in a good, good situation at that time and I got an advance from dial Yes. And I went to Japan. And I literally talked to everybody it turned out that Yasuo Nishino was a is sort of the father of physics in Japan didn’t turn out that’s the way it was. Initially, I had been the head of the army program and he had early on been brought in and basically to do a pilot program and you know, the Army and the Navy were very much at odds with each other in Japan. It has to do with their culture and everything else and they didn’t even talk to each other but simultaneously another noted physicist name, Woonsocket, Erica two, he had he was

brought in by the Navy. And so they have these two programs going on. One by Nisha and one by auto Nakatsu. The initial program is the one that most people have I’ve heard about or at least if you dig into this you find out it initially, it was. He was very, very well regarded and he was a great friend of Niels Bohr. And they used to talk to each other until the war started. And anyway, I went to Japan. I interviewed people who were involved in this, the guy who built all of the huge industry in Korea. He was dead. But Joon Noguchi was his name but he was one of the boxes who like Mitsubishi and all the rest of but he was a self-made guy and he did it by going over to Korea and starting a huge industrial complex there. And he had heavy water plants there before the war started. And, and eventually and I remember to forget sitting in, in mission is it’s sort of a shrine now the rescan is a huge area. I mean acres and acres and acres, 1000 acres, and it has all kinds of stuff on it, but this is where it all began. And I went to his office and his secretary and she set up some meetings with some of the nations as physicist assistants who worked on the bomb with him. And I remember a guy his name was Tamaki, and he’s a big physicist. I don’t think he’s alive. Now. This was like 3040 years ago. And I remember Tamaki saying to me, well, when we were working on the physics of it, which we were which we easily did, you know, it was well known and we figured this out the problem was going to be we would need a great industrial power. And he said, they said to us, don’t worry, no Gucci will take care of that. And subsequently, after interviewing, I would say 25 people involved with the program. I was able to write my first edition of this,

which was published by Morrow, and

there was much to be learned at that time and 10 years later, it was republished by Marlowe in 1995. And I went back and you asked me about did I find any secret documents? Well, boy, oh boy. I went to the National Archives in which was 1985. And I was able to find an area of the archives that was marked off and what it was boxed Things have documents that had never been that have not yet been read or classified. And so I had a friend there who had helped me with something earlier than I had. And he was a he was quite a legendary archive is there and he was able to a lot to get me in to begin to, to them to look through these boxes and the boxes were like these are from the occupation in Tokyo, these are front and they were sufficiently labeled so that I didn’t have to go through all 300 boxes, but I could start picking out things. And that’s when I first I’ll never forget it. I started looking maybe for three or four days, not much luck and then I pulled out this report by that. David Snell that I see an agent who I told who talked about that they had fired off this bomb. And that was the beginning. And from there I went through I was able to get into top-secret CIA documents from the war from the Korean War and, and between World War Two and the Korean War. And I mean, it was just a hunting expedition. It was a find a needle in a haystack, you would go but but but slowly you begin to get names, you begin to get times you begin to get units. And you could go places and lo and behold, it began to click together. And that’s how the story came out and both going to Japan and the National Archives.

Scott Rank 37:48
One other factor with this. You mentioned a little bit about spies from the Soviet Union infiltrating the Manhattan Project. I think his name is George Koval from the United States who spied on The Manhattan Project for the Soviet Union, another spy in Japan, Richard Sergei, who is German, but spied, also for the Soviets, and didn’t speak great Japanese, but he was at the German embassy and had a lot of friends there and would find intelligence and send it back to Russia. As far as you know, are there any spies who infiltrated the Japanese atomic program? I could see how that would be a little bit more complicated. Or maybe they did? I don’t know.

Robert Wilcox 38:30
Great question. You see that first article that I saw that one of the New York Times The thing that got me onto this in the first place, was about a guy named Caspar de Velasco. And by the way, I know of those spies who just spoke for they were very important spies. His name was al Caspar de Velasco, and he was a fall on working for Franco during the Civil War, and a very, very tough fascist type guy and a spy, and a very flamboyant x bullfighter and that kind of thing, say, and the story one of the stories that I dug up early was that he said he worked for the Japanese, and actually spied on our Los Alamos. And he did so by coming through Mexico on a submarine. And when you check all this out that was going on big time, there were lots of Japanese spies down in, in, in Mexico, when the war started and throughout the war, and he was in the book you will read that. I went to to to Spain, and I interviewed him and he told me Oh, yes, I went to, I went to Mexico. The Japanese hired me they did so through there. German contacts because he was working for that he loved the Germans and was working for the Germans. And they sent him to Mexico. He went there and his he, he was two. And I can’t remember right now, but he, he sends to Mexicans into the area where Los Alamos is and they come back and they, he has the Japanese meet him in Mexico. This is like 4149 Excuse me. 4243 and, and he remembers how they were sort of afraid to get near the guys, they were supposed to bring back materials. And this all goes along with the fact that there’s no question that the Japanese knew we were working on an atomic bomb Tojo calls is one of the big generals involved in the program. She might end in 43 and says things are going bad for us. We’re going to have to develop the bomb. The Americans are working on it.

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