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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 Mark 4 nuclear bomb was an American implosion-type nuclear bomb based on the earlier Mark 3 Fat Man design, used in the Trinity test and the bombing of Nagasaki.With the Mark 3 needing each individual component to be hand-assembled by only highly trained technicians under closely controlled conditions, the purpose of the Mark 4 was to produce an atomic weapon as a practical piece of ordnance.
Theodore Alvin Hall (October 20, 1925 – November 1, 1999) was an American physicist and an atomic spy for the Soviet Union, who, during his work on United States efforts to develop the first and second atomic bombs during World War II (the Manhattan Project), gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of several processes for purifying plutonium, to Soviet intelligence.
The Trinity bomb was officially a Y-1561 device, as was the Fat Man used later in the bombing of Nagasaki. The two were very similar, though the Trinity bomb lacked fuzing and external ballistic casing. The bombs were still under development, and small changes continued to be made to the Fat Man design. [59]
For both the Trinity device and the Fat Man (Nagasaki) bomb, nearly identical plutonium fission through implosion designs were used. The Fat Man device specifically used 6.2 kg (14 lb), about 350 ml or 12 US fl oz in volume, of Pu-239, which is only 41% of bare-sphere critical mass (see Fat Man article for a detailed drawing).
Weighing 14 pounds and responsible for 80,000 deaths, the heart of the "Fat Man" atomic bomb was detonated on August 9, 1945, over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Related: Iconic photos from WWII:
Mark 3 – "Fat Man" plutonium implosion weapon (used against Nagasaki), effectively the same as the "Gadget" device used in the Trinity nuclear test with minor design differences. (21 kilotons, 1945–1950) Mark 4 – Post-war "Fat Man" redesign. Bomb designed with weapon characteristics as the foremost criteria. (1949–1953)
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 ...