American Nukes

About Little Boy

There was never a decision to drop the atomic bomb. Truman never signed an order. There was no War Department meeting that gave the green light.

Oh, there was talk about announcing the existence of the Bomb to force Japan’s surrender, that surely the Japanese would surrender when they learned of the existence of the Bomb. There was talk about exploding the Bomb in some remote place as a demonstration, that surely the Japanese would surrender when they saw the awesome power of the Bomb. There was talk about dropping leaflets over Japanese cities, warning of the coming of the Bomb, that surely the Japanese would surrender when they realized the next plane might carry the weapon itself.

But the voices who called for the Bomb to be dropped on a city prevailed and surely now that it had been dropped the Japanese would surrender.

And then President Truman announced to Japan that we had indeed dropped the Bomb and that it was an atomic bomb, a new weapon harnessing the deep powers of nature, and that we would drop more of them, that we would destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications if Japan did not now surrender. But even then, with the city of Hiroshima devastated, with Japan’s inability to defend against the Bomb and against the planes carrying the Bomb that flew higher than their highest-flying fighter, they did not surrender.

The bomb that fell upon the Japanese, named Little Boy, was the creation of science but it was mostly the creation of industry. Designing this uranium-based bomb did not occupy much of the time of the people at Los Alamos. The scientific principles of this design were, by that time, well understood and the structure of the bomb, basically a tube that fired one piece of uranium into another, was relatively easy to engineer and manufacture. The hard part was getting the uranium in the first place, the right kind of uranium, and so the sprawling industrial plant at Oak Ridge which purified naturally-occurring uranium was of central importance (now often overlooked) to producing the first nuclear weapons.

The United States had Los Alamos and it had Oak Ridge and we dropped the bomb on Japan three weeks after the Trinity test, as fast as Little Boy could be shipped to an airbase in range of the Japanese mainland. If Japan had had their own Los Alamos and their own Oak Ridge they would surely have used the bomb first. Perhaps they would have used it at Pearl Harbor, ending the War in the Pacific on the same day it began, their power over East Asia and the Philippines assured. If the Nazis had had their own Los Alamos and their own Oak Ridge they would surely have dropped the bomb on Leningrad, ending that never-ending siege, or used the weapon anywhere along the relentlessly advancing Soviet front in the years that followed. If the Soviets had had their own Los Alamos and their own Oak Ridge we can easily imagine them using the Bomb at Leningrad as well, this time blasting the encircling enemy, the coming vengeance and retribution made visible in that mushroom cloud.

Back in Japan, at 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, Little Boy is falling now, the Enola Gay beginning to bank sharply away to get as far from the blast as possible, to orient the plane against the inevitable overpressure wave that will soon race up behind it. The ten-foot-long bomb accelerates as it falls, unstable with its large, ungainly-looking rear stabilizer, side-lit by the morning sun as it descends, still far above the clouds. It gains speed as it falls and the bomb falls for a 43-second eternity, moving very quickly now, just a few more seconds until it strikes the Earth, but that is not to be.

The altimeter triggers and Little Boy detonates. There is a blinding flash of visible light and a flash of invisible radiation, the thermal emissions so hot that everything all around on the ground nearly two thousand feet below ignites, the fireball expanding now with its 10,000-degree sun’s surface heat and the 900 mph blast wave.

The wooden structures which make up most of Hiroshima collapse for a mile in all directions and, with the bomb’s heat and the short-circuiting of the city’s electrical network, hundreds of fires, thousands of fires sprout up and they grow and combine into a great super-fire that knows no mercy, that redefines hell itself.

Tens of thousands of people are already dead and many die from burns and injuries in the days to come and then, a few weeks later, the massive radiation exposure reveals its nightmarish damage to human tissue in the form of patients with disintegrating bodies, a medical calamity never before seen, and thousands more die.

And that was Little Boy. One of the least powerful nuclear weapons ever made.

Gallery

Click for details on the photographs

1. A Little Boy replica at the Bradbury Museum of the Los Alamos National Lab. The is in the main exhibit gallery but is not the star of the show by any measure, perhaps understandable given Los Alamos many other activities over the years and their desire to highlight their work that benefits non-military purposes.
2. At Wings Over the Rockies, an aerospace museum in Dallas. This Little Boy sits on its transport cart (uncommon to see). You can see the bomb again with its cart is image #4 of the model plane being loaded.
3. The same display as image #2. The plan that the bomb appears to “go with” has no relationship to it at all. It is a B-18 Bolo and the weight of Little boy was more than twice the plane’s entire bomb load capacity.
4. In this model from Wendover Historic Airfield (where Tbbets and crews trained to drop the Little Boy and Fat man bombs) you can see that the bomb loaded via special loading pit where the plane would drive up over the bomb. Even for these B-29s the weight of the bomb was so great the the plane would jerk sharply upwards upon release of the weapon.
5. One of the most famous individual planes in history, this is the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the annex of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, located just outside of Washington, DC, in Chantilly, Virginia. A bomb is nothing without a plane to deliver it and few planes in the world could carry the weight of Little Boy. The Boeing B-29 Superfortress  (its development the most expensive of all the weapons programs in WWII, easily surpassing the cost of the entire Manhattan Project) is a central part of the story of Little Boy and Fat Man, though often underemphasized.
6. A model of Little Boy located at Wendover Historic Airfield, in Utah, on the California border. The base, once neglected, is now being restored. This model, made by John Coster-Mullen (see VIDEOS and FURTHER READING sections, both below), is considered one of those accurate and is a centerpiece if the historical base, though the weapon was never here. Wendover was the base where the crews of the B-29s practiced dropping the bomb.
7. A close-up of the same bomb, where you can see the the signatures of Paul Tibbets and other crew members of the Hiroshima mission (the crew visited in 2004). You can see Tibbets’ signature center right, written large.
8. An image from the new galleries at the K-25 History Center at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the site where the uranium was purified for use in Little Man and for further processing into plutonium in Washington, State. The display emphasizes the many other locations (in addition to the famous Los Alamos) that worked on developing the bomb.
9. Just down the road from the K-25 History Center, the American Museum of Science and Energy has their own Little Boy, which is illuminated in various ways in synch to a video presentation.

Want to see nuclear weapons for yourself, in person? Check out Where to See Nuclear Weapons in the Resources section.

Nukemap

NUKEMAP is a web-based mapping program that attempts to give the user a sense of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. It was created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian specializing in nuclear weapons (see his book on nuclear secrecy and his blog on nuclear weapons). The screenshot below shows the NUKEMAP output for this particular weapon. Click on the map to customize settings.

Videos

Click on the Play button and then the Full screen button on the lower right (the brackets on a mobile device) to view each video. Click on the Exit full screen button (the “X” on a mobile device) to return.