Word: fukuryu
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...effects of the March 1 thermonuclear explosion (TIME, March 22) continued to reverberate around the world. By last week the big blast had touched off an investigation in Washington, spread panic through Japan and strained U.S.-Japanese relations. The latest bad news came from a Japanese fishing boat, the Fukuryu Maru (Fortunate Dragon), which churned into its home port of Yaizu last week with more than 16,500 lbs. of radioactive tuna and shark and 23 terrified crewmen. They had reason to be frightened: all had been burned by radioactive ash, and the most severely injured men were showing...
Flashlights and wrist compasses were standard fukuryu equipment. They could communicate with each other up to 16 feet apart by using breathing units as megaphones, up to 1,000 feet by knocking pieces of metal together. Planned, but not yet built at the war's end, were reinforced concrete underwater dens where crouching dragons could lie in wait for ships. At war's end there were 4.000 fukuryus at Yokosuka, of whom 1,200 were fully trained...
Captain K. Shintani, in charge of the fukuryu program, explained these plans to Commander M. H. Pryor of the U.S. Naval Technical Mission in Japan. He ruefully admitted that the new weapon might not have been decisive, but the Japanese had hoped they would cause as much damage as the Kamikazes (suicide planes), which accounted for 80% of the 223 U.S. ships damaged during the Okinawa campaign...
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