Fiction: ‘Daikon' by Samuel Hawley

Wall Street Journal

6 days ago

Samuel Hawley's 'Daikon' springs from a hypothetical. What if the U.S. military had deployed not two but three atomic bombs to be used against Japan during World War II? When Mr. Hawley's absorbing alternative history begins, an attempted U.S. attack goes haywire: The B-29 aircraft carrying the first of these bombs is shot down over Japan, leaving an undetonated weapon with world-altering destructive power in the hands of the enemy.
But will the Japanese understand what they have and know how to use it? The novel centers on two men who are uneasily allied by the discovery at the crash site. Lt. Col. Shingen Sagara is a staunch militarist who recognizes the bomb as one of the devastating 'new-type' weapons that have been rumored about but generally thought to be years from arrival. He conscripts Keizo Kan, a physicist in Project Ni-Go (Japan's less successful version of the Manhattan Project), to study the bomb and prepare it for immediate use against the country that created it.
'Daikon'—the word, meaning radish, becomes the bomb's codename—unfolds like a detective novel, as Kan works backward to grasp how the weapon was made. Mr. Hawley has previously written nonfiction (including 'The Imjin War' from 2005, a history of Japanese conquest in the 16th century) and he is a fluent explainer of complex subjects. The captured bomb is technologically identical to the one used on Hiroshima. It contains rings of enriched uranium that are shot at each other inside a tube, a process not unlike the firing of a gun. Kan is staggered by the design that is at once ingenious and almost rudimentary.
The story barrels ahead urgently, as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki take place while Kan is working. Sagara becomes desperate to launch a reprisal that will thwart Japan's 'surrender faction' and extend the war to its brutal, bitter end. Kan finds himself bound to the bomb's fate, and thus to the war's. He has a connection to the U.S., having studied physics under Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley. He is also deeply affected by the death of his daughter, who was killed in the U.S. Air Force's firebombing of Tokyo. Duty, anger, sorrow, conscience and even hope mix together to form the novel's bracingly intimate ending. Even in alternate histories, it is startling to consider how single decisions can decide worldwide outcomes.