Three Boeing B-29 Superfortresses circle high above the city of Hiroshima. They are noticed and dismissed by both civilian and military observers on the ground. The Japanese had noticed lately that small flights of B-29s had taken to flying above key cities, occasionally dropping single bombs. Since it was flights of 500 bombers and more that were systematically dismantling the Imperial Japanese war machine, these comparatively tiny missions were met with puzzlement, but little worry, by the observer corps that tracked them.
They were practice missions-test runs, in other words-flown by the 509th Composite bomb group, the world's first nuclear-capable fighting force. The crews chosen to fly for the 509th knew little more than they were training to drop some kind of superbomb. Those among them who had read the science fiction of H. G. Wells might have suspected that it was a bomb that harnessed the power of the atom, but the implications of that were unknown. Would it be capable of destroying several city blocks, an entire harbor, perhaps? Few of them had ever heard of the Manhattan Project, or Los Alamos, or the Alamagordo Test Site. The bomb crews of the U.S. Air Force had yet to begin thinking in terms of kilotons of explosive power. Later, after the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became clear to all, the prophetic words of J. Robert Oppenheimer spoken upon the first nuclear detonation must have made perfect sense: "I am become Death, the Destroyer, Shatterer of worlds."
A B-29 called the Enola Gay, named for its commander's mother, led that tiny flight. The other two Superfortresses carried no offensive weaponry, just cameras and instruments. The Enola Gay itself carried but one bomb, known to history as Little Boy.
Little Boy was classified as an Uranium Gun Weapon, so called because its chain reaction was triggered by one bit of uranium being fired cannon-like into another, causing critical mass. It was a design considered by physicists to be disdainfully inefficient, but it had one endearing characteristic: they were sure it would work. Indeed, the other type of nuclear weapon developed at Los Alamos, called a Plutonium Implosion Device, was an elegantly economic weapon, but it was something of a question mark. No one was sure what, exactly, the design would engender until it was tested. The gamut of opinions among scientists ran from a complete fizzle, to an ignition of all the world's hydrogen, and thus Armageddon. It was nevertheless duly tested at Trinity Test Site in July of 1945, yielding a desirable 20 kiloton blast. The Plutonium Implosion design was replicated in the second atomic bomb, Fat Man, which was delivered to Nagasaki on August 9th.
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Patrick Worden's History of Flight topic, please visit the Discussions page.