This timeline originally appeared on the Today in Alternate History blog site as the two articles 10th August, 1945 - Sagane opens the Alvarez letter and 20th August, 1945 - Soviet forces occupy Nanking.
If
there was irony as well as tragedy in the propaganda phrase "Loose Talk
Costs Lives" then it was because the experimental physicist Luis Walter
Alvarez was shocked and appalled by Truman's wildly inaccurate
depiction of the bombing of Hiroshima. The president had mistakenly said
that the energy of the blast was equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT, the measurement of the test bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Of course he might have been exaggerating simply because he had
threatened the "complete and utter destruction" of Japan in his Potsdam
Declaration. Alvarez, however, knew for certain that it was only 13 kilotons.
This was because of the radio transmitter-based measurement device that
he had parachuted out of a chaser plan flying directly behind the Enola
Gay.
Even had it been
blatantly ignored by the military hierarchy, the measurement would still
be required for the bombing of Nagasaki even though Alvarez was not assigned
to the operational mission. This proved to be a costly miscalculation
because he decided to take matters into his own hands. Whether through
guilt or anger, but certainly for the wrong reasons, Alvarez took the
fateful decision to attach to the device a warning letter addressed to a
scientific colleague called Ryokichi Sagane, a physicist working at the
University of Tokyo. The letter was edited by two of Alvarez
colleagues, Bob Serber and Phil Morrison.
The
Japanese military recovered the letter and handed it to Sagane on August
11th. The emotional Alvarez liked to think that maybe his persuasive
words would play a role in the rapidity of the Japanese surrender. If so, he was very badly mistaken because Sagane deduced from his words
that the United States had exhausted its stock of enriched uranium.
The
Imperial Japanese Government agreed with him but in the present moment
were equally if not more concerned by the rapid advancement of Soviet
forces. This fear was actually shared by the Americans who would have a
third bomb (fourth if one counted the test) ready by August 18th. Due to
Alvarez breaking the rules, it would be necessary to drop this device
on the city of Kokura in order to end Japanese procrastination before
the Soviets could make a move on Japanese territory.
As
events were to transpire the shape of the post-war world had been
transformed in the very moment that Sagane opened the fateful letter of
warning. The Soviets learnt of this development via intercepted signal
traffic. With their forces crossing the Yalu River, they decided to act
upon this intelligence by declining the American request to pause the
invasion of Korea at the 38th parallel.
Meanwhile,
the Chinese cities of Nanking, Tientsin and Shanghai were occupied by
the Red Army. The consequence of this would be that China, rather than Korea, would be partitioned
along the Yangtze River following VJ Day. In the long-run this outcome might well have saved
Chiang's Nationalist regime but in the present moment the Soviet
expansion in the Pacific was unexpected. Indeed it seemed to many in the
West that the atomic bomb had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
This proved not to be the case because Nationalist China, strongest of the Asian economic Tigers, became the
bulwark of American power in the Pacific long beyond Chiang Kai-shek's
death in 1975. The continuation of his rule had enabled the government of South Vietnam to weather the storm of civil war.
Author's Note: In
reality, Sagane did not pass the letter until after the war, and Alvarez
did not actually sign it in his name until much later in 1949.
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