「中国」の核開発

――ウラン鉱探査をめぐる国際政治と中国――

抄録

This article explores the Chinese Nationalists’ early nuclear development and the international politics contesting over uranium deposits in China at the beginning of the Cold War.

Current historiography on China’s nuclear program describes that China began building the bomb at Mao Zedong’s decision at a secret meeting among top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party in January 1955. But at the latter half of the 1940s, the Nationalists had already sent young and capable scientists to the United States, with an expectation to build an atomic bomb with both technical and financial foreign assistance. Although the Communist history only negatively writes of the frustrated Nationalist attempt, in fact it bore some fruits that were eventually succeeded to the Communists when they came into power in 1949.

The most important legacies that the Nationalists left to the Communists were uranium deposits and scientists. Since the discovery of nuclear fission of uranium in 1938, and countries began contesting for new deposits of uranium around the world. The Japanese army also dug China’s northeast region, Manchuria, for uranium to build a bomb.

The Japanese discovery of uranium in Manchuria was inherited to the Nationalists. The Nationalists themselves had also found the resources in Southern China in 1943. They also planned to use the Japanese scientists for their bomb. The Soviet filled the vacuum that the Japanese defeat had made in Manchuria and Xinijiang, while the United States started talks with the Nationalists to jointly develop uranium mines in China and to provide China with training Chinese nuclear scientists and engineers in the United States. Switzerland also showed interests in uranium with a promise to send renowned scientists to help China to develop an atomic bomb.

The Nationalist efforts on the nuclear program were not only about uranium. They also dispatched young and promising physicists to the United States in 1946 so that they could learn the knowledge to build a bomb. Although they were not permitted an access to the military secrets at the beginning of the Cold War and the McMahon Act of 1946, what they learned was huge enough to be a “founding father” of China’s atomic bomb, in Zhu Guangya’s case at least.

Thus, the Chinese Nationalist government boasted that it had enough knowledge about uranium and human resources for the basis of building an atomic weapon as early as the spring of 1947. They lost to the Communists in the Civil War, which forced them to flee to Taiwan. But their early effort was, partly and against their will, took over to the Communists.