Ink.

This is coolbert:

A personal note on blogging. It is really amazing when you are doing research how you come across items of interest that you were not searching for in the first place. Items you may have perused before, but did not originally strike you as being something that could be or would be blogged about. But this does happen.

Yesterday, while searching through a book looking to corroborate an idea that I had and DID want to blog about, I read a passage in the book that I must have overlooked previously. Only upon re-reading did this tidbit become of interest to me. I DID NOT find the corroboration that I originally was searching for, but did find something that now is of interest, and surprisingly so.

It seems that the Japanese, perhaps prior to and surely during the Second World War [WW2] were using radioactive secret ink.

Some sort of system allowing for communication with secret agents.

What this does indicate, is that the Japanese once again, perhaps prior to the war, and surely during the war, were engaged in nuclear research.

Research that had fruition at least in the use of radioactive secret ink. Albeit a minor research product, it does bear witness to the fact that the Japanese DID have nuclear research going on. Research that in years subsequent to the war has been denied or pooh-poohed as being only minor.

Some of you may remember my previous blog entry regarding the book "Japan's Secret War", which maintains that perhaps, and only perhaps, the Japanese did detonate a "device" that was nuclear in nature in the days just prior to the end of WW2.

Can the fact that the Japanese DID engage in the production of radioactive secret ink be placed in the category of "where there is smoke, there is fire" category?? That this indicates only a small part of a much larger nuclear research capacity? A capacity that resulted in the detonation of a nuclear "device"?? I think not!

Here is how I think the radioactive secret ink worked.

The secret agent would have been supplied with a bottle of fluid [ink] that has been rendered radioactive in some way [radium perhaps].

To write a message using the radioactive secret ink, the secret agent takes a plate of glass and lays it flat on a table. Using a pen, the secret agent then dips the nib of the pen in the "ink" and writes his message on the glass.
Before the liquid can dry, the agent then takes a blank sheet of paper and using that paper as a blotter, carefully blots the liquid onto the paper.

The characters written in the liquid secret radioactive ink will be blotted onto the blank sheet of paper.

Allowing for the liquid to dry, the agent then writes a normal letter using normal ink on the presumably blank sheet of paper, and forwards that letter, containing the secret message, to a contact or cut-out.

This contact or cut-out in turn will forward the secret message to the Japanese agent runner. A sheet of ordinary photographic paper can then be exposed for a period of time to the "normal letter", the radioactivity of the secret ink blotted onto the "letter" creating a latent image on the photo paper.

The latent image containing the secret message is then exposed using normal photo developing techniques. Pretty smart!

coolbert.