ee ovata en -m aa SESSION II EISENBUD: 61 Well, apparently I'm not too good on the dates, flew straight through. In those days it was about 40 hours. I I think I got there around the 19th or 20th, 48 hours later. There was a lot of confusion everywhere. You've got to remember that 1954 was the end of a very bad time for the Japanese. It was nine years post-war but the upturn really hadn't begun. They were two years past the Peace Treaty. The scientific community wasn't organized. The Japanese had no instruments, not even Geiger counters. Also, there was a lot of jockeying for position among the Japanese. Well, I went very innocently myself. Actually I was all packed for going into Eniwetok anyway, and within an hour I changed my plans and icft for Japan and kad no contact with anybody until I got there, When got there, there rnaust have been a thousand people with signs at the airport, and I wondered who the big shot aboard was; I found out it was I! [Laughter] Somehow or other, through this telegram, they had wora that I was coming and were picketing. Some American MPs had been permitted to cone to escort me into a limousine, which was right at the foot of the ramp. Well, this of itself was very bad. A number of Japanese had come out to the airport to meet me, some of whom’! knew quite well, but I wasn't permitted to see them. They had waited for hours, and I was put into the lirnousine and whisked out to the Embassy so that I could brief the staff. So that was the beginning. The Japanese had no way of getting the basic information that they needeu, They knew nothing about bombs; there was no way in which they could get, for example, information on the fission products that you would expect, the debris, and what kind of activation products would be present. On the other hand, the next morning one of the firet people I saw was Doctor Kimura, who was one of the first radiochemists who actually had been a student of radioactivity, and who in 1945 was the one who had taken soil samples from Nagasaki and Hiroshima and concluded that there was plutonium in the Nagasaki bomb, based on his analysis and what he read in the newspapers. By the time I talked with Kimura the next morning, he had already analyzed the debris and had detected uranium- 237, which led him to the conclusion that there must have been an n2n reaction which involved the fast fission of uranium- 238, I mention this because at that time this was a very sensitive fact in our weaponeering and here I was sitting with a man who had deduced something in a couple of days that was known to very few people in the United States. So you