Soviet Espionage - B-36
What did they know and when did they know it? The extent of Soviet espionage against the B-36 program is very poorly documented, but surely must have been extensive. The B-36 was the first bomber capable of striking the Soviet Union directly from bases in the United States. The B-29, which clearly had attracted Soviet espionage interest, which initially billed as a "Hemispheric Defense Weapon" for an isolationist America, and in any event could not strike the Socialist Motherland except with the help of bases in the Eurasian landmass.
But the B-36 "Peacemaker" was aimed a striking Eurasia directely from North America. Initially conceived as a means of striking the Axis Powers, the ever-suspicious Stalin would have immediately grasped the potential uses of such a weapon once the fascist forces had been defeated, and the inevitable conflict between capialism and socialism resumed.
But there is preciously little evidence on this front. The trail of espionage against the Manhattan Project is well documented. There is fragmentary evidence of Soviet espionage operations against the B-29. But the trail is cold with respect to Soviet espionage collection against the B-36.
In Japan, the "Z Project" was conceived by Nakajima Chikuhei, the founder of Nakajima Aircraft. This project was conceived by Nakajima himself. Since 1942, when Japan was in a mood of optimism, having been intoxicated by the success of the early stages of the Pacific War, he had been concerned about the large gap in resources and industrial power between Japan and the United States. He had a keen eye for the trends in American air strategy, and, based on the situation of the B-29 and B-36, which the United States had begun to develop, predicted the arrival of the B-29 in the autumn of 1944.
In April 1943, Chief Engineer Koyama, along with Ota Minoru, Shibuya Iwao, Naito Kosei, Nakagawa Ryoichi and other top design staff from within the company were gathered at Nakajima Club, Nakajima Aircraft's recreational facility in Ota, Gunma Prefecture, where they explained their hopeless "Z Plan" and had everyone locked up in the building (overnight) to work day and night on the basic design, with strict instructions to complete it "by June". This is the legendary "Club Canned Incident".
With this work, the "Z Project" finally began to take shape. It was a giant aircraft with six engines and three wheels, a monster that could carry 20 tons of bombs and fly 16,000 km. Information about the American B-36 had been heard as rumors, but there was no way to know more than that. In comparison, the B-36 was a size smaller, but the load capacity and performance were far superior. In the autumn of 1943, the military, frustrated by the worsening war situation, finally took up the giant plane "Z", which Nakajima had been researching alone, as a full-scale joint Army-Navy prototype, and it became a large-scale project involving the Ministry of the Army and Navy, the Air Research Institute, the Technical Research Institute, the Air Technical Arsenal, and each aircraft company.
According to one of the Nakajima engineers who had been gathered at legendary "Club Canned Incident", "The president (Nakajima Chikuhei) mysteriously managed to get hold of US aviation information from somewhere. He had previously said that "We cannot beat the industrial power of the US".
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