Sunday, March 22, 2009

Reproductions of Little Boy and Fat Man. Little Boy was the first nuclear weapon used in warfare. It exploded approximately 1,800 feet over Hiroshima, Japan, on the morning of August 6, 1945, with a force equal to 13,000 tons of TNT. Immediate deaths were between 70,000 to 130,000.
Little Boy was dropped from a B-29 bomber piloted by U.S. Army Air Force Col. Paul W. Tibbets. Tibbets had named the plane Enola Gay after his mother the night before the atomic attack.
Fat Man was the second nuclear weapon used in warfare. Dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, Fat Man devastated more than two square miles of the city and caused approximately 45,000 immediate deaths.
Major Charles W. Sweeney piloted the B-29, #77 that dropped Fat Man. After the nuclear mission, #77 was christened Bockscar after its regular Command Pilot, Fred Bock. While Little Boy was a uranium gun-type device, Fat Man was a more complicated and powerful plutonium implosion weapon that exploded with a force equal to 20 kilotons of TNT.

3 comments:

  1. Ohhh boy....my son would never get out of that museum. Anything that involves flight/Nasa/etc. Actually I would enjoy it also.

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  2. Brownie was stationed there 100 year's ago :) Is Sydney named after the Australia Sydney?

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  3. Sharon: Sydney was settled in 1878 when a trading post was started by buffalo hunter, Pete Snyder. The city was incorporated in 1884.

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