40 minute timer explosion series#

Īnother explanation of the names, from a classified United States Air Force history of Project Silverplate from the 1950s, implies a possible reconciliation of the two versions above: that the terms 'Thin Man' and 'Fat Man' were first developed by someone at or from Los Alamos (i.e., Serber), but were consciously adopted by the officers in Silverplate when they were adopting their own codenames for their own project (including 'Silverplate'). Ramsey, claimed in his brief 'History of Project A,' that the early bomb ballistic test shapes designs were referred to as 'Thin Man' and 'Fat Man' by (unspecified) 'Air Force representatives' for 'security reasons,' so that their communications over telephones sounded 'as if they were modifying a plane to carry Roosevelt (the Thin Man) and Churchill (the Fat Man),' as opposed to modifying the B-29s to carry the two atomic bomb shapes as part of Project Silverplate in the fall of 1943. In September 1945, another Project Alberta physicist, Norman F. Little Boy was named by others as an allusion to Thin Man since it was based on its design. The 'Fat Man' was round and fat so it was named after Kasper Gutman, a rotund character in Hammett's 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, played by Sydney Greenstreet in the 1941 film version.

40 minute timer explosion series#

The 'Thin Man' was a long, thin device and its name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel and series of movies about The Thin Man. Los Alamos and Project Alberta physicist Robert Serber claimed, many decades after the fact, to have named the first two atomic bomb designs during World War II based on their shapes: Thin Man and Fat Man. There are two primary accounts of how the first atomic bombs got their names. 'Little Boy' was itself derived from the earlier design codenames of 'Thin Man' and 'Fat Man'. Naming Robert Serber claims that the original gun-type design, Thin Man, was named after the series of noir films based on the work of Dashiell Hammett that were popular in the 1930s and 1940s.

By 1950, only five complete weapons had been created, and these were retired by November 1950. Unlike the implosion design, which required sophisticated coordination of shaped explosive charges, the gun-type design was considered almost certain to work so it was never tested before its first use at Hiroshima.Īfter the war, a number of components for further Little Boy bombs were built. Its components were fabricated at three different plants so that no one would have a copy of the complete design. Little Boy contained 64 kilograms (141 lb) of highly enriched uranium, although less than a kilogram underwent nuclear fission. Fission was accomplished by shooting a hollow cylinder (the 'bullet') onto a solid cylinder of the same material (the 'target') by means of a charge of nitrocellulose propellant powder.

It derived its explosive power from the nuclear fission of uranium-235, whereas Thin Man was based on fission of plutonium-239. Like Thin Man, it was a gun-type fission weapon. Little Boy was developed by Lieutenant Commander Francis Birch's group at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, a reworking of their abandoned Thin Man nuclear bomb. The Hiroshima bombing was the second nuclear explosion in history, after the Trinity nuclear test. It exploded with an energy of approximately 15 kilotons of TNT (63 TJ) and caused widespread death and destruction throughout the city. Tibbets Jr., commander of the 509th Composite Group, and Captain Robert A. The bomb was dropped by the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay piloted by Colonel Paul W. Little Boy was the name of the type of atomic bomb used in the bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 during World War II, making it the first nuclear weapon used in warfare.