| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Secret Weapons and World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science. By Walter E. Grunden. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. xii, 335 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-7006-1383-8.)

In a 1974 annotated bibliography of the history of Japanese science, James Bartholomew wrote, "Virtually nothing on [the 1930s and early 1940s] has been available in English" (in Science and Society in Modern Japan, ed. Nakayama Shigeru, David L. Swain, and Yagi Eri). Walter E. Grunden studied as an undergraduate with Bartholomew, and his Secret Weapons and World War II helps plug that hole. In this revision of his 1998 thesis (written at the University of California at Santa Barbara), Grunden argues that Japan "fell short of such major accomplishments" as the resonant cavity magnetron, the V-2 missile, and nuclear weapons and that "Japan's failure to organize large-scale research and development projects for the war effort stalled its progress [after the war] toward the fourth stage [semiconductors, superconductivity, biotechnology] of high-technology development" (p. 5). Grunden focuses on "new, higher technology weapons" rather than "technical improvements on more conventional weapons" (p. 7).

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