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Chapter 6

Tokyo, Japan

October 1941

About the time of Nathan Blum’s death, a short, rumpled Japanese man limped out of an apartment near the entrance to the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo. He climbed awkwardly into the rear of a car-for-hire.

The apartment belonged to the man’s mistress; the car was paid for by the Rikken Laboratory in western Tokyo. Both the woman and the car had been made possible by the man’s recent appointment as head of the nuclear physics division of Rikken. Known as the “Father of the New Physics” in Japan, he had built his country’s first cyclotron—a 26-incher. His next project was construction of a gigantic 60-incher weighing 220 tons.

At barely five feet, Chinda Nishikawa was sometimes mistaken for a dwarf. His withered left arm was deformed at birth, and he dragged his left foot when he walked. As happens, the strength that should have gone into his arm and foot went into his mind. He was a true genius with a doctorate in electrical engineering from the Imperial University in Tokyo. He had studied at Cambridge under Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel Prize laureate, and at Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. He had become an expert in cosmic rays and quantum mechanics.

In 1940 and 1941 Nishikawa had published four well-received papers on fission experimentation. One was entitled “Induced (Beta) Activity of Uranium by Fast Neutrons,” prompting a leading American scientist, Arthur H. Compton, to postulate that Japan’s work in atomic research was at about the same advanced stage of development as Americas’.

Doctor Nishikawa had discovered a new uranium isotope, U-237, which was the same chemically as U-238 but different atomically.

That cool fall morning the hire-car transported the distinguished gnome of an atomic scientist to his office in the Rikken Laboratory, a mammoth complex of 54 buildings erected in 1917.

On his desk Nishikawa found notification that the anxiously awaited research grant from the Japanese air force had reached Rikken’s accounting section. If Doctor Nishikawa had been demonstrative, and physically able, he would have leaped onto his desk and danced a jig. With this money he could move ahead rapidly with several projects. One of them was a nuclear weapon—a bomb—for the air force.

The Japanese navy also wanted to give him money to develop nuclear weapons for them. Fine. He would take their money, too. The more the better. He had more ideas than they had money.

Sadly, Dr. Chinda Nishikawa was an unpleasant man. He was terse, rude, inconsiderate, and arrogant. His new mistress did not like him at all and regretted she had entered into their patron-protegee arrangement. His wife was thankful her husband had a mistress, since it meant he would seldom be home to torment her and their two children, who feared him as if he were an ogre from a Japanese folk tale.