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"Thin Man" was the code name for a proposed plutonium-fueled gun-type nuclear bomb that the United States was developing during the Manhattan Project. Its development was abandoned in 1944 after it was discovered that the spontaneous fission rate of nuclear reactor -bred plutonium was too high for use in a gun-type design due to the high ...
The name Fat Man refers to the early design of the bomb because it had a wide, round shape. Fat Man was an implosion-type nuclear weapon with a solid plutonium core. The first of that type to be detonated was the Gadget in the Trinity nuclear test less than a month earlier on 16 July at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico.
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. 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. Little Boy was ...
Fat Man was the second nuclear weapon to be deployed in combat after the US dropped a 5-ton atomic bomb, called "Little Boy," on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
[107] [108] The names for all three atomic bomb designs—Fat Man, Thin Man, and Little Boy—were chosen by Serber based on their shapes. Thin Man was a long device, and its name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel and series of movies of the same name.
A bomb rack loaded with four B61 tactical nuclear bombs in 1986. During the Cold War, the Pentagon saw tactical nukes as a possible panic button should NATO forces prove unable to hold back more ...
The names were based on their design shapes; the "Thin Man" would be a very long device, and the name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel and series of movies of the same name; the "Fat Man" bomb would be round and fat and was named after Sydney Greenstreet's character in The Maltese Falcon (from Hammett's novel). "Little Boy" would ...
The uranium gun-type weapon known as Little Boy did prove to be simpler than Thin Man. The gun velocity needed to be only 1,000 feet per second (300 m/s), a third that of Thin Man. A corresponding reduction in the barrel length reduced the bomb's overall length to 6 feet (1.8 m).