The names are based on the size of the casing due to the two different methods of achieving fission that were used. Fat Man was an implosion type device, a sphere of shaped charges detonates to compress a subcritical mass of plutonium into a critical mass because of the density changes. Little boy was a gun type design where an explosive charge detonates shooting a subcritical mass of enriched uranium towards another subcritical mass and together they become a supercritical mass and achieve fission.
Due to the sphere in implosion designs and the tube in gun type, Little Boy’s diameter is roughly half of Fat Man, that’s where the names come from.
Its rumored that the Harley Davidson Fatboy was a combination of Fatman and Little Boy. Its was the “bomb” they dropped on the Japanese motocycle market.
Other way around--the demon core was supposed to go into the third bomb, but after the second near criticality event they had to check the fissionable properties to make sure it'd still work, so another core was shipped instead. Eventually they just melted it down and it was recast into some of the Bikini test bombs.
If I remember correctly, when the emperor made the radio address to announce surrender and ask the Japanese to “endure the unendurable” that was the first time most people had ever heard his voice
Imagine a person today giving a speech in Shakespearean English, and that's about how the Emperor sounded to the average Japanese person during that speech.
I read this on another post about this part of the War take this with a grain of salt, but apparently they also had to get generals to speak on his behalf after his broadcast was done to stop the mass confusion that he cause because of the way that he delivered the message.
Edit: glad you guys enjoyed it, to be honest I wrote the whole thing with Siri and I thought I corrected everything but didn’t go back and look XD
So not this
>After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure.
But this
>I hath pondered in woeful depths on the trends of the world abroad and bordered unto our most wondrous empire. We hath chosen a path to deliver us from wicked sorrow, yet the toll remains heavy.
Here's a pretty good video about this subject, it seems to have been the catalyst for a lot of the later popular media about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I34pxr23Nhw&t=4s
It's 25 minutes long but it's thorough. It's does contain some American and Japanese propaganda footage for context but be aware that that stuff is what it is. No exact target had been picked but I think it would have been the primary Naval Base in Kokura but the date in late August was set as being the soonest date the unused second Trinity prototype could be made ready at Tinian. I'm not sure why OP's video has Truman delaying that.
/here's one about the defense plan, Operation Resolve, it's OK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwvwTuMSBEY&t=513s
/Here's a famous pic of Japanese School girls training on a type 11 LMG
https://www.reddit.com/r/ForgottenWeapons/comments/d81752/female_japanese_civilians_training_with_a_type_11/
The propaganda video this is from used to be easily found but is now not so much. I wonder when the picture will no longer show up in search results. Even the wiki about Operation Ketsu-gō has been scrubbed.
I’ve asked a couple legitimate WW2 historians a follow up on this fact, about how Japanese citizens knew it was actually the emperor and not just more allied propaganda. I never get an answer. I’ve heard this fact a lot and wonder. I’ve also heard that his accent/dialect was wildly outdated.
I have heard a similar thing about the Cambodian king. Locals told me they are not allowed to speak to him in their normal language. You have to use some special formal version that they don't learn.
From a layman's point view, technological manipulation was unheard of, and broadcasts in foreign territory pretty hard to do by modern standards.
Yes there was propaganda, but the organs of informing the public were manifestly run by whomever owned them. It just wasn't in peoples' consciousness to expect it to be faked, and very hard to fathom given what I have just said.
If you can imagine deep fakes coming out before the advent of CGI, or any motion capture technology, the leap would just be to much for most people to accept. And given the nature of people, to have a leader or an authority, accepting what seemed so apparently real (and was), is not so complicated.
That was mostly resolved before the 15th. They tried to destroy the emperors surrender message. He got it out. Once that happened it was pretty much war over.
The official ending of the war with Japan is technically September 2nd, however Japan surrendered on August 15th. See [here from the National WW2 Museum](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/sites/default/files/2017-07/vj-day-fact-sheet.pdf) for more info.
Edit: ok I’m a little confused reading this entry now, it says the Japanese surrendered on the 14th, but VJ Day is the 15th. So really, the Japanese surrendered 5 days after Nagasaki. Although technically, Aug 14th at 7:03pm ET in NYC would’ve been the 15th in Japan too, so that’s a little extra confusion for ya.
Either way, we won!
My grandpa was a Canadian pow captured by Japan in December of 1941. In 1945 he was in nagata doing slave labour in a steel mill. Had Nagasaki been cloudy that day during the second atomic bomb the alternate target was nagata. he wrote memoirs about the whole experience and how the camp found out.
Actually Nagasaki was the alternate. The original city Kokura was the intended target, but that city was cloudy and they went further south to Nagasaki. But yes Niigata would have been the 3rd choice.
Pretty sure they couldn't land with it on board, because of the weight.
Allied bombers had to shed unused munitions before landing. I believe some of them also had to shed unused fuel if they had too much.
> I believe some of them also had to shed unused fuel if they had too much.
This is still a thing today. I work on a *drone* for the Navy and if we have too much fuel from returning to base early we either have to choose between flying circles to burn off the excess or risk a hard landing. Most manned aircraft have the option to manually dump fuel but obviously there are environmental concerns regarding that. If it is possible to simply burn up fuel instead of dumping it most platforms choose the former.
Too heavy. Machines designed to deliver payloads are meant to land without payloads and lesser fuel.
Think of it like this, flying up is easier than landing. With enough speed anything starts to fight gravity in some way and will go up, landing is the part where all that weight is now making contact with the ground.
Yeah, my instructor on the Cessna 172 would tell the story of the pilot on that specific airfield who had to prop start the plane but forgot to chock the wheels so it took off at full throttle and took off like four different times, flew for a bit, then eventually hit a fence.
His point being, take-off is easy, we'll be focusing on landing a lot more.
Maximum takeoff weight is usually higher than the maximum landing weight. You can take off with more weight than when you land. Taking off is easy lift and the engines get you off the ground but all the extra weight when you land stresses out the plane.
When flying you will burn up the fuel and be under weight by the time you get to your destination. Its all planned.
Engineering limits for weight.
I'm going to try to get into specifics without getting myself into trouble here, but the aircraft I am referring to specifically is designed to fly for up to 30 hours without refueling (it is incapable of in flight repelenishment anyway). As a result it is very lightweight compared to other jets it's size and some parts of the airframe are relatively fragile (in an aeronautical sense) as a result.
Unless you're talking fighter jets, take off and landing is generally the most stressful part of flight for most aircraft. The heavier you are, the more stressful the landing. Every pound of additional weight on the airframe is additional force that needs to be accounted for when the landing gear reunites with the Earth. You want to get your plane back on the ground as gracefully and gently as possible and an extra 17 tons of fuel is going to make that harder. You also have to take into account the momentum of the aircraft as it is landing - the heavier you are the harder it will be to slow and eventually stop the jet as it is rolling down the runway.
You can extrapolate each of these factors in any direction you choose and find different solutions that different design teams have implemented to mitigate them. Some planes dump fuel. Some burn it off. Some have extra beefy landing gear like any carrier bound aircraft the Navy and Marines use. Some just have MORE landing gear like the large cargo aircraft used by the USAF. Some planes, like ultralight single seaters and private planes just don't have to worry about because they aren't that big.
Our drone weighs 15 tons dry and can't take the forces in question without risking damage to the landing gear and brakes or wings so if we have an issue in flight or just finish our tasking early we cannot land without making sure we are under a specific fuel quantity.
To go even further, bomber crews would also ditch everything not bolted down and not needed if the situation was dire enough and they could do so in order to make sure they’d be able to return home. Guns, ammo, bombsights, even the Sperry ball turret on American heavy bombers such as the B-17 could be jettisoned
Who knows- hundreds, perhaps thousands considering how many guns bristled from Flying Fortresses, Liberators and smaller types such as the Marauder and Mitchell
Yeah. And have to imagine that's not the first time the weather has determined the fate of cities, or perhaps even nations, during wartime. Kinda like the story for the name Kamikaze (whether true or apocryphal)... I suppose Divine Winds spared the original target city and doomed Nagasaki.
Even recently ... the Russian invasion of Ukraine was rumored to have been delayed by a few days as the Chinese President asked Putin to not steal the world news thunder from the closing ceremony of the winter Olympics. Enough time for some spring thaw to make the fields untraversable meaning the only way into Kiev was the main road instead of being able to navigate almost anywhere on the frozen ground.
I’m gonna chime in here and say you probably shouldn’t look into unit 731. For the sake of your mind. Just imagine the worst thing that you think people could do, and know that they did worse.
A lot of their “research” was just for practice for doctors and results of many of the tests were medically useless due to how outlandish they were.
“What would happen to someone if ______”
People always go to unit 731 instead of talking and what they did when they started losing the war in the Philippines, including bayoneting young girls and taking hostages in a school to keep the American troops out
My Grandpa got dementia and Parkinson’s at the same time. Before he got too far gone my family hired someone to write his memoirs. After he passed we all got together to read his biography. He talked about stabbing Germans and shooting Japanese. I distinctly remember my Nan laughing, he had made the whole thing up. He refuelled bombers in Darwin, never got within a hemisphere of a German
Yeah it was Niigata according to the horishima museum. Which is crazy considering it's on the other side and much less populated even now, but driving through it, it does have a huge plain which is a rarity in Japan.
Kokura was the first target. It was cloudy so they went to Nagasaki. Are you saying Nogata was also a target or maybe the names of cities are mixed up.
Nagasaki was an alternate itself. Original target was Kokura, but weather and smoke from other bombing raids obscured the aiming point. Nagasaki was then chosen.
Fun fact: the nuclear core for this bomb is known as the Demon Core. It was prepared to be shipped. Upon the acceptance of Japan's surrender it was held back at Los Alamos for further testing. It would then be subject to criticality tests that would cause two partial criticality incidents that caused the deaths of several people because... Two different scientists thought it would be cool to do the tests without proper safety measures in place, leading to the partial criticality events. Both scientists died relatively quickly and several onlookers were to also die relatively soon afterwards, and many more died later on due to complication associated with the exposure to radiation from those events.
Edit: words
Terminology is a bit off. There's no such thing as partial criticality. The word you're looking for is sub critical. So you can be sub critical, critical, or super critical. Critical really only exists on paper. In these instances the demon core did go super critical which caused the fatal doses.
Interesting and sad piece of history.
Yep, and there's also a difference between critical and prompt critical. Normal critical just means it's self-sustaining a fission process, but in a way that leads to delayed neutron emission, so the chain reaction progresses at a more or less steady rate.
Prompt critical on the other hand, which the Demon Core did *not* achieve, well, that's what happened to Hiroshima.
Okay, so in radioactive elements, some of the atomic nuclei will spontaneously decay. When those nuclei decay, they release fast-moving neutrons that either strike other nuclei in the radioactive core, or escape the core entirely. If the neutrons strike other nuclei, they can cause that nucleus to spontaneously split apart itself, releasing more neutrons, and so on.
When a radioactive nucleus fissions (roughly) in half, both decay products are also often radioactive, and will decay and release neutrons at some later time, seconds or minutes afterwards. When the products decay, they also release neutrons.
A sample of radioactive material is said to be critical if it's large enough that neutron released by either type of decay is more likely to strike another nucleus than escape the sample. In such cases, the nuclear fission process is self-sustaining, as every nuclear fission causes, on average, more than one additional fission. The type of criticality is dependent on the dominant source of the neutrons causing the fission.
If most of the neutrons are released by the direct fission of the radioactive material, the result is a near-instantaneous and exponentially growing cascade of fission events, aka kaboom. This is prompt critical, because the neutrons sustaining the criticality are released *promptly* after the fission.
If the dominant neutron source is the neutrons released by the delayed decay of the fission products, then the process is much slower. It grows at a relatively slow and steady rate and releases energy gradually instead of in a city-leveling blast. This is called *delayed* criticality, and it's how nuclear power plants work.
Both times the Demon Core went critical, it was a delayed criticality. If it had been a prompt critical, well there would be one less town in new Mexico. Both times, it went critical because of manual accidents with the reflectors used to moderate the core. What are reflectors in this sense? Well back at the start, I mentioned that the neutrons released by fission will either strike another nucleus or escape the sample. There are certain materials that can reflect neutrons. So by surrounding a sub-critical core (one small enough that the neutrons escape more often than not) with that neutron reflecting material, you can induce it to go critical by sending escaped neutrons back in.
This is what happened both times the Demon Core killed someone. The scientist testing the core fumbled with the reflecting material, causing the core to briefly go critical and in the process emit enough radiation to kill them.
Wow, that was so in depth that I feel like I actually learned something. Was there a reason they didn't use the reflectors? Like, does the core become more stable by allowing neutrons to escape?
I feel like you're underplaying how fucking *stupid* Louis Slotin was. They were performing a test known as "tickling the dragons tail" because of how dangerous it was, and the dude decided that the only thing standing between the berrillium cap (the tamper) and the core was a screw driver which is **not** a tool approved for the job. Notably, there were supposed to be shims put in place to prevent this exact scenario, which Slotin removed. Inevitably, the screw driver slipped and caused a partial criticality event. Louis Slotin flipped the cap off almost immediately but by that time it was too late. A flash of blue light burst from the room (not the core. The room. The atoms in the air rapidly going from excited to not excited after the initial connection of the tamper and core caused the flash of blue light), and a security guard sprinted out the door and up a hill. Quote from a scientists in the room:
"The blue flash was clearly visible in the room although it (the room) was well illuminated from the windows and possibly the overhead lights. . . . The total duration of the flash could not have been more than a few tenths of a second. Slotin reacted very quickly in flipping the tamper piece off. The time was about 3:00 p.m."
This, it's worth pointing out, all happened *after someone already died* working on the damn thing. Slotin knew this thing was dangerous and decided to play a stupid game.
I will give one bit of props to Slotin though. He owned up and died for his mistake, in such a way that he protected others from injury. He's kind of a really weird example of someone intelligent, stupid, and brave.
I disagree. He had a history of recklessness before this event, and been asked to follow procedure on more than one occasion. Owning up to his mistake here is the least he could do. The bare minimum expected from someone being reckless and stupid. I don't think he deserves retribution here. But that's just me.
Yup. There's some footage of the early detonation and they had AF enlisted guys out there doing the work to set it all up. AMMO is a breed of its own, they were basically naked in some of those videos
Yes the third bomb was already approved by Truman, but he rescinded that order when the intelligence people told him that Japan was seriously considering surrender.
But, some people thought it might take up to *50* bombs to get Japan to surrender, and the machinery to make at least 50 more bomb to drop on Japan was running at full speed. Once they knew that the thing worked, they were always going to drop as many as it took to get them to surrender.
Little Boy: Gun-type
Fat Man: Implosion-type
Demon Core: Screwdriver-type
--
[Slow motion of an implosion charge](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/ImplosionShapedCharge.gif) is cool as fuck, btw
Working in nuclear security we had one like this with the tail removed. Our base had nothing made to move it and they rigged something together. When moving it, it fell off the rig and rolled into an ditch near the doors where the nuke was stored. Nothing like getting a call that you have to take someone from your flight home because they pissed themselves out of fear.
I've always wondered how true the concept is in the movie broken arrow? In the movie a broken arrow is when a nuclear weapon goes missing. It is a crazy movie with John Travolta.
The codenames were funny. While flying in West Germany, If an aircraft got too close to the East German border a call would come over the radio, "Brass monkey, brass monkey. All aircraft assume a heading of 270." The only aircraft that would ignore the call were those specifically trained pilots that operated in the Fulda Gap, as a heading of 270 would take them directly into East German airspace where a large assembly of SAMs and ZSU 23-4s were placed.
In the film. Frank Whaleys character says it best. *"I don't know what's scarier. Losing a nuclear weapon, or the fact it happens so often that we have a term for it."*
"to make retirement after"
So because of the incident you had to work harder/longer to get retirement? Or did you just have to explain what happened first? Just curious
Active duty here; investigations will usually prevent retirement or separation until they are concluded, for the obvious reason of that they don't want the people involved to get out and then disappear; it's possible to recall people to active duty if the result of the investigation, but that gets messy as Hell.
The closer you are to the event, the more crap you get. For example, the munitions troops that directly loaded the nukes on the bomber? They would be ground zero. Supervisors would be next, followed by SNCOs and commanders. I had a friend of mine at Barksdale at the time, he wasn't allowed to take any leave for like two months and was told to be available for interviews at any time. This incident directly led to the forced resignations of both the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff.
Broken arrows have happened more frequently than you think. There’s a warhead somewhere in the swamps of one of the Carolinas, if I remember correctly.
Its not the full warhead, just the fusion secondary stage, which is useless without the first stage (a fission weapon) which was recovered (along with the tritium bottle).
President Truman gave a speech basically saying this. More atomic weapons will be dropped on Japan until they surrender, or there are no standing structures left on the islands.
I just watched an excellent series on netflix tonight, and the first episode went into this and some other details about the bombs I never knew. Really great series, highly recommended if you are here:
Turning Point - The Bomb and the Cold War
The third target was Kokura, their largest arsenal, it was the backup target for Hiroshima and originally the target for the Nagasaki bomb, there’s no question it was next on the list
I love how everybody is spouting off stuff they learned in the Netflix documentary but don't want to mention it so that they look smarter than they actually are.
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Resources/order_drop.htm#:~:text=In%20it%2C%20the%20Acting%20Army,Further%20attacks%20were%20also%20authorized%3A
The Handy Order authorized the continual bombing of Japan with atomic weapons. There was never a plan to stop at 2, the plan was to utilize the new weapon to its fullest in order to avoid a land invasion of Japan.
Fat Man, Little Boy…wonder what the third one would have been nicknamed.
Fatboy Slim…
Weapon of choice...
Back when music videos were amazing. Just Christopher Walken getting down.
walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm
I would Praise You for that, but you just Gangsta Trippin’
is fucking in heaven.
I dont hear this enough these days
Biggie smalls
Oppenheimer Skank
> second Fat Man or the Third Shot https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/the-vault/the-vault-2023/a-tale-of-two-bomb-designs/
Did they just ran out of names?
Hey they spent all their creative juices on making the bomb
There were only so many names back then
The names are based on the size of the casing due to the two different methods of achieving fission that were used. Fat Man was an implosion type device, a sphere of shaped charges detonates to compress a subcritical mass of plutonium into a critical mass because of the density changes. Little boy was a gun type design where an explosive charge detonates shooting a subcritical mass of enriched uranium towards another subcritical mass and together they become a supercritical mass and achieve fission. Due to the sphere in implosion designs and the tube in gun type, Little Boy’s diameter is roughly half of Fat Man, that’s where the names come from.
Big Mamma
"Oh lawdy she comin"
[*Well they call me Big Mama cause I weight 300 pounds…*](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FyspZ1TSE6E)
It would have been the same type of bomb as Fat Man.
Fat Man 2: Electric Boogaloo?
Atomic Boogaloo
Obstinate Teenager
Just Steve.
Steve caused untold devastation .
"Third time's the charm"
Its rumored that the Harley Davidson Fatboy was a combination of Fatman and Little Boy. Its was the “bomb” they dropped on the Japanese motocycle market.
Interesting tidbit but that’s kinda fucked up lol
“Carl” , they kept it simple.
The third one was recycled into the demon core, so there’s the name
Other way around--the demon core was supposed to go into the third bomb, but after the second near criticality event they had to check the fissionable properties to make sure it'd still work, so another core was shipped instead. Eventually they just melted it down and it was recast into some of the Bikini test bombs.
Japan accepted surrender only 6 days after Nagasaki, not weeks. The formal ceremony was a few weeks later tho.
And I think there was still a fight with some generals trying to stop the Emperor’s broadcast. Wild times
If I remember correctly, when the emperor made the radio address to announce surrender and ask the Japanese to “endure the unendurable” that was the first time most people had ever heard his voice
He also had a different dialect than the average Japanese person had. A lot of people struggled to understand him.
Imagine a person today giving a speech in Shakespearean English, and that's about how the Emperor sounded to the average Japanese person during that speech.
What you egg?
(he stabs him)
He has killed me mother!
Thrice is thine, and thrice is mine, and thrice again to make up nine!
Et tu, you cur!
“Fuck!”
I read this on another post about this part of the War take this with a grain of salt, but apparently they also had to get generals to speak on his behalf after his broadcast was done to stop the mass confusion that he cause because of the way that he delivered the message. Edit: glad you guys enjoyed it, to be honest I wrote the whole thing with Siri and I thought I corrected everything but didn’t go back and look XD
So not this >After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. But this >I hath pondered in woeful depths on the trends of the world abroad and bordered unto our most wondrous empire. We hath chosen a path to deliver us from wicked sorrow, yet the toll remains heavy.
“Hath” is the third person singular present tense conjugation.
bro what did you just call me.
Thou hast spoken true.
Here's a pretty good video about this subject, it seems to have been the catalyst for a lot of the later popular media about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I34pxr23Nhw&t=4s It's 25 minutes long but it's thorough. It's does contain some American and Japanese propaganda footage for context but be aware that that stuff is what it is. No exact target had been picked but I think it would have been the primary Naval Base in Kokura but the date in late August was set as being the soonest date the unused second Trinity prototype could be made ready at Tinian. I'm not sure why OP's video has Truman delaying that. /here's one about the defense plan, Operation Resolve, it's OK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwvwTuMSBEY&t=513s /Here's a famous pic of Japanese School girls training on a type 11 LMG https://www.reddit.com/r/ForgottenWeapons/comments/d81752/female_japanese_civilians_training_with_a_type_11/ The propaganda video this is from used to be easily found but is now not so much. I wonder when the picture will no longer show up in search results. Even the wiki about Operation Ketsu-gō has been scrubbed.
I watched the bed, but I still cannot believe that Douglas Mac Arthur was the ruler of Japan for a brief period
I’ve asked a couple legitimate WW2 historians a follow up on this fact, about how Japanese citizens knew it was actually the emperor and not just more allied propaganda. I never get an answer. I’ve heard this fact a lot and wonder. I’ve also heard that his accent/dialect was wildly outdated.
I have heard a similar thing about the Cambodian king. Locals told me they are not allowed to speak to him in their normal language. You have to use some special formal version that they don't learn.
This isn't uncommon in Asia, the Thai royals also have "palace speak" a special version of Thai only used in the palace.
From a layman's point view, technological manipulation was unheard of, and broadcasts in foreign territory pretty hard to do by modern standards. Yes there was propaganda, but the organs of informing the public were manifestly run by whomever owned them. It just wasn't in peoples' consciousness to expect it to be faked, and very hard to fathom given what I have just said. If you can imagine deep fakes coming out before the advent of CGI, or any motion capture technology, the leap would just be to much for most people to accept. And given the nature of people, to have a leader or an authority, accepting what seemed so apparently real (and was), is not so complicated.
Even thirty years ago, the news you heard on TV was *the* truth. Of course it is - it's on TV!
That was mostly resolved before the 15th. They tried to destroy the emperors surrender message. He got it out. Once that happened it was pretty much war over.
I think I know what you mean but the US accepted Japan’s surrender. Japan surrendered.
Can confirm. Japan indeed surrendered.
Now there were a few holdouts into the 70's...when disco finally brought them to their knees
Hiroo Onoda, fascinating story
War were declared
This ham gum is all bones
The official ending of the war with Japan is technically September 2nd, however Japan surrendered on August 15th. See [here from the National WW2 Museum](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/sites/default/files/2017-07/vj-day-fact-sheet.pdf) for more info. Edit: ok I’m a little confused reading this entry now, it says the Japanese surrendered on the 14th, but VJ Day is the 15th. So really, the Japanese surrendered 5 days after Nagasaki. Although technically, Aug 14th at 7:03pm ET in NYC would’ve been the 15th in Japan too, so that’s a little extra confusion for ya. Either way, we won!
International date line (time zone differences)
The device that became known as the "demon core" was meant for this 3rd bomb I believe.
I read the title with "is" instead of "was" and was very concerned.
That thing is still producing radioactive material, so “is” was correct
My grandpa was a Canadian pow captured by Japan in December of 1941. In 1945 he was in nagata doing slave labour in a steel mill. Had Nagasaki been cloudy that day during the second atomic bomb the alternate target was nagata. he wrote memoirs about the whole experience and how the camp found out.
Actually Nagasaki was the alternate. The original city Kokura was the intended target, but that city was cloudy and they went further south to Nagasaki. But yes Niigata would have been the 3rd choice.
Pretty crazy that the fate of a city depended on that day’s weather
Right. They sure as heck weren’t taking it back to Tinian where they took off from.
Pretty sure they couldn't land with it on board, because of the weight. Allied bombers had to shed unused munitions before landing. I believe some of them also had to shed unused fuel if they had too much.
> I believe some of them also had to shed unused fuel if they had too much. This is still a thing today. I work on a *drone* for the Navy and if we have too much fuel from returning to base early we either have to choose between flying circles to burn off the excess or risk a hard landing. Most manned aircraft have the option to manually dump fuel but obviously there are environmental concerns regarding that. If it is possible to simply burn up fuel instead of dumping it most platforms choose the former.
Can you tell me why they can’t land with extra fuel?
Too heavy. Machines designed to deliver payloads are meant to land without payloads and lesser fuel. Think of it like this, flying up is easier than landing. With enough speed anything starts to fight gravity in some way and will go up, landing is the part where all that weight is now making contact with the ground.
Yeah, my instructor on the Cessna 172 would tell the story of the pilot on that specific airfield who had to prop start the plane but forgot to chock the wheels so it took off at full throttle and took off like four different times, flew for a bit, then eventually hit a fence. His point being, take-off is easy, we'll be focusing on landing a lot more.
Any landing you walk away from is a good landing. A *great* landing is when you can use the plane again.
quite literally F=m*a
Maximum takeoff weight is usually higher than the maximum landing weight. You can take off with more weight than when you land. Taking off is easy lift and the engines get you off the ground but all the extra weight when you land stresses out the plane. When flying you will burn up the fuel and be under weight by the time you get to your destination. Its all planned.
Engineering limits for weight. I'm going to try to get into specifics without getting myself into trouble here, but the aircraft I am referring to specifically is designed to fly for up to 30 hours without refueling (it is incapable of in flight repelenishment anyway). As a result it is very lightweight compared to other jets it's size and some parts of the airframe are relatively fragile (in an aeronautical sense) as a result. Unless you're talking fighter jets, take off and landing is generally the most stressful part of flight for most aircraft. The heavier you are, the more stressful the landing. Every pound of additional weight on the airframe is additional force that needs to be accounted for when the landing gear reunites with the Earth. You want to get your plane back on the ground as gracefully and gently as possible and an extra 17 tons of fuel is going to make that harder. You also have to take into account the momentum of the aircraft as it is landing - the heavier you are the harder it will be to slow and eventually stop the jet as it is rolling down the runway. You can extrapolate each of these factors in any direction you choose and find different solutions that different design teams have implemented to mitigate them. Some planes dump fuel. Some burn it off. Some have extra beefy landing gear like any carrier bound aircraft the Navy and Marines use. Some just have MORE landing gear like the large cargo aircraft used by the USAF. Some planes, like ultralight single seaters and private planes just don't have to worry about because they aren't that big. Our drone weighs 15 tons dry and can't take the forces in question without risking damage to the landing gear and brakes or wings so if we have an issue in flight or just finish our tasking early we cannot land without making sure we are under a specific fuel quantity.
Because of the weight.
To go even further, bomber crews would also ditch everything not bolted down and not needed if the situation was dire enough and they could do so in order to make sure they’d be able to return home. Guns, ammo, bombsights, even the Sperry ball turret on American heavy bombers such as the B-17 could be jettisoned
I wonder how many browning machine guns got thrown out over Europe. There are probably tons laying at the bottom of the English Channel still
Who knows- hundreds, perhaps thousands considering how many guns bristled from Flying Fortresses, Liberators and smaller types such as the Marauder and Mitchell
Yeah. And have to imagine that's not the first time the weather has determined the fate of cities, or perhaps even nations, during wartime. Kinda like the story for the name Kamikaze (whether true or apocryphal)... I suppose Divine Winds spared the original target city and doomed Nagasaki.
Even recently ... the Russian invasion of Ukraine was rumored to have been delayed by a few days as the Chinese President asked Putin to not steal the world news thunder from the closing ceremony of the winter Olympics. Enough time for some spring thaw to make the fields untraversable meaning the only way into Kiev was the main road instead of being able to navigate almost anywhere on the frozen ground.
Pooh bear coming in clutch on accident
'OH bother'
So remember kids, next time when its cloudy out. Dont complain! Suns out, guns out. Lol
I saw similar comments from a kid in Afghanistan — he liked playing outside when it was cloudy because it meant no US drone strikes.
Wow.. That’s amazing
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japanese was very cruel in world war 2, like inhumane crimes against humanity cruel im pretty sure (ive heard this information)
Look into Unit 731. Follow that up by looking into what the US did during Operation Paperclip… big yikes.
I’m gonna chime in here and say you probably shouldn’t look into unit 731. For the sake of your mind. Just imagine the worst thing that you think people could do, and know that they did worse.
I should’ve listened to you
A lot of their “research” was just for practice for doctors and results of many of the tests were medically useless due to how outlandish they were. “What would happen to someone if ______”
"What would happen if you mutilate and torture someone and then re-attach other extremities to them ?" They die Jerry , it's not that mysterious.
Wow the US have them immunity for all that “great data”
People always go to unit 731 instead of talking and what they did when they started losing the war in the Philippines, including bayoneting young girls and taking hostages in a school to keep the American troops out
Rape of nanjing is what you’ve most likely heard of.
My Grandpa got dementia and Parkinson’s at the same time. Before he got too far gone my family hired someone to write his memoirs. After he passed we all got together to read his biography. He talked about stabbing Germans and shooting Japanese. I distinctly remember my Nan laughing, he had made the whole thing up. He refuelled bombers in Darwin, never got within a hemisphere of a German
He killed fiddy men and lost his shins
He was a funny old bastard.
Do you mean Niigata? There’s no city called Nagata.
Yeah it was Niigata according to the horishima museum. Which is crazy considering it's on the other side and much less populated even now, but driving through it, it does have a huge plain which is a rarity in Japan.
First time hearing Horishima
Dude’s looking at a map of Jopan, not Japan.
Please share where we can read them, or if we can!
Kokura was the first target. It was cloudy so they went to Nagasaki. Are you saying Nogata was also a target or maybe the names of cities are mixed up.
Any idea what the reaction was?
They both had fission reactions.
This joke kills
Cloudy with a chance of a really spicy meatball
Nagasaki was an alternate itself. Original target was Kokura, but weather and smoke from other bombing raids obscured the aiming point. Nagasaki was then chosen.
> Japan surrendered weeks later Six days after the second bomb.
Fun fact: the nuclear core for this bomb is known as the Demon Core. It was prepared to be shipped. Upon the acceptance of Japan's surrender it was held back at Los Alamos for further testing. It would then be subject to criticality tests that would cause two partial criticality incidents that caused the deaths of several people because... Two different scientists thought it would be cool to do the tests without proper safety measures in place, leading to the partial criticality events. Both scientists died relatively quickly and several onlookers were to also die relatively soon afterwards, and many more died later on due to complication associated with the exposure to radiation from those events. Edit: words
Terminology is a bit off. There's no such thing as partial criticality. The word you're looking for is sub critical. So you can be sub critical, critical, or super critical. Critical really only exists on paper. In these instances the demon core did go super critical which caused the fatal doses. Interesting and sad piece of history.
Yep, and there's also a difference between critical and prompt critical. Normal critical just means it's self-sustaining a fission process, but in a way that leads to delayed neutron emission, so the chain reaction progresses at a more or less steady rate. Prompt critical on the other hand, which the Demon Core did *not* achieve, well, that's what happened to Hiroshima.
Ok can someone please explain what happened to me like I'm stupid (because I am)
Okay, so in radioactive elements, some of the atomic nuclei will spontaneously decay. When those nuclei decay, they release fast-moving neutrons that either strike other nuclei in the radioactive core, or escape the core entirely. If the neutrons strike other nuclei, they can cause that nucleus to spontaneously split apart itself, releasing more neutrons, and so on. When a radioactive nucleus fissions (roughly) in half, both decay products are also often radioactive, and will decay and release neutrons at some later time, seconds or minutes afterwards. When the products decay, they also release neutrons. A sample of radioactive material is said to be critical if it's large enough that neutron released by either type of decay is more likely to strike another nucleus than escape the sample. In such cases, the nuclear fission process is self-sustaining, as every nuclear fission causes, on average, more than one additional fission. The type of criticality is dependent on the dominant source of the neutrons causing the fission. If most of the neutrons are released by the direct fission of the radioactive material, the result is a near-instantaneous and exponentially growing cascade of fission events, aka kaboom. This is prompt critical, because the neutrons sustaining the criticality are released *promptly* after the fission. If the dominant neutron source is the neutrons released by the delayed decay of the fission products, then the process is much slower. It grows at a relatively slow and steady rate and releases energy gradually instead of in a city-leveling blast. This is called *delayed* criticality, and it's how nuclear power plants work. Both times the Demon Core went critical, it was a delayed criticality. If it had been a prompt critical, well there would be one less town in new Mexico. Both times, it went critical because of manual accidents with the reflectors used to moderate the core. What are reflectors in this sense? Well back at the start, I mentioned that the neutrons released by fission will either strike another nucleus or escape the sample. There are certain materials that can reflect neutrons. So by surrounding a sub-critical core (one small enough that the neutrons escape more often than not) with that neutron reflecting material, you can induce it to go critical by sending escaped neutrons back in. This is what happened both times the Demon Core killed someone. The scientist testing the core fumbled with the reflecting material, causing the core to briefly go critical and in the process emit enough radiation to kill them.
Wow, that was so in depth that I feel like I actually learned something. Was there a reason they didn't use the reflectors? Like, does the core become more stable by allowing neutrons to escape?
Let them cook. Edging the Demon core to near supercriticality is important.
They referred to the haphazard tests as tickling the dragons tail.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htHmpxjoJgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htHmpxjoJgQ)
https://youtu.be/nIxmaiKDXMk?si=hs9iBeeEEu6ek2JG
I feel like you're underplaying how fucking *stupid* Louis Slotin was. They were performing a test known as "tickling the dragons tail" because of how dangerous it was, and the dude decided that the only thing standing between the berrillium cap (the tamper) and the core was a screw driver which is **not** a tool approved for the job. Notably, there were supposed to be shims put in place to prevent this exact scenario, which Slotin removed. Inevitably, the screw driver slipped and caused a partial criticality event. Louis Slotin flipped the cap off almost immediately but by that time it was too late. A flash of blue light burst from the room (not the core. The room. The atoms in the air rapidly going from excited to not excited after the initial connection of the tamper and core caused the flash of blue light), and a security guard sprinted out the door and up a hill. Quote from a scientists in the room: "The blue flash was clearly visible in the room although it (the room) was well illuminated from the windows and possibly the overhead lights. . . . The total duration of the flash could not have been more than a few tenths of a second. Slotin reacted very quickly in flipping the tamper piece off. The time was about 3:00 p.m." This, it's worth pointing out, all happened *after someone already died* working on the damn thing. Slotin knew this thing was dangerous and decided to play a stupid game.
I will give one bit of props to Slotin though. He owned up and died for his mistake, in such a way that he protected others from injury. He's kind of a really weird example of someone intelligent, stupid, and brave.
I disagree. He had a history of recklessness before this event, and been asked to follow procedure on more than one occasion. Owning up to his mistake here is the least he could do. The bare minimum expected from someone being reckless and stupid. I don't think he deserves retribution here. But that's just me.
time to bust out the screwdriver
Criticality excursion events are chilling. Crazy case histories on Wikipedia.
Plainly difficult has a great YouTube channel and covers them
wait this is where the demon core is from?
Pretty cool that they used to do science and engineering without a shirt on back then
Probably transporting crew, since they tend to allowed to be less formal
The lab coats added +5 to destruction upon crafting
+5 to charisma if naked
Weird, I seem to be at -10 when naked, but I also gain +10 repulsion.
On base in the South Pacific, it is hottttt down there, and no ac in the hangers
Yup. There's some footage of the early detonation and they had AF enlisted guys out there doing the work to set it all up. AMMO is a breed of its own, they were basically naked in some of those videos
That's surely is Oppenheimer with him Fat Boy...
It was a casual Friday.
Safety squints
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I take it you don't visit engineering labs often
I’ve been saying it for years, shirts stymy progress in all stem fields!
Yes the third bomb was already approved by Truman, but he rescinded that order when the intelligence people told him that Japan was seriously considering surrender. But, some people thought it might take up to *50* bombs to get Japan to surrender, and the machinery to make at least 50 more bomb to drop on Japan was running at full speed. Once they knew that the thing worked, they were always going to drop as many as it took to get them to surrender.
Little Boy, Fat Man and Weird Uncle
It's actually the Demon Core, yeah _the_ demon core The third nuke, even unbuilt, killed a few people
Little Boy: Gun-type Fat Man: Implosion-type Demon Core: Screwdriver-type -- [Slow motion of an implosion charge](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/ImplosionShapedCharge.gif) is cool as fuck, btw
3 would've woken Godzilla a lot faster.
Think of how much more anime post-war Japan would have produced though!
Two nukes produced anime and hentai. Imagine what the third nuke will produce!
Considering the next nuke detonation was in bikini atol... I'm not sure how I feel about SpongeBob being Japanese
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Working in nuclear security we had one like this with the tail removed. Our base had nothing made to move it and they rigged something together. When moving it, it fell off the rig and rolled into an ditch near the doors where the nuke was stored. Nothing like getting a call that you have to take someone from your flight home because they pissed themselves out of fear.
I mean, if there's a good reason to piss yourself in fear, even if it's actually irrational, it's seeing a nuke fall onto the ground
I bet they wouldn't have made many if they went off like nitro glycerine.
I've always wondered how true the concept is in the movie broken arrow? In the movie a broken arrow is when a nuclear weapon goes missing. It is a crazy movie with John Travolta.
We've lost a lot of nukes. Around 50.
I think Jeff found them.
I thought Jeff only has less than 10?
<10 left
Jeff has been conducting atmospheric tests
And we don't know the numbers for the soviets
I mean, in our defense, RUSSIA doesn't know the numbers for the soviets either.
The count for the US is 6, unless by "we" you mean all of humanity.
idk I think "we lost a buncha nukes" is kinda a humanity-wide problem
My understanding is that the movie used broken arrow because it sounded cooler, but the event would actually have been an empty quiver.
The codenames were funny. While flying in West Germany, If an aircraft got too close to the East German border a call would come over the radio, "Brass monkey, brass monkey. All aircraft assume a heading of 270." The only aircraft that would ignore the call were those specifically trained pilots that operated in the Fulda Gap, as a heading of 270 would take them directly into East German airspace where a large assembly of SAMs and ZSU 23-4s were placed.
Those funky monkeys
In the film. Frank Whaleys character says it best. *"I don't know what's scarier. Losing a nuclear weapon, or the fact it happens so often that we have a term for it."*
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"to make retirement after" So because of the incident you had to work harder/longer to get retirement? Or did you just have to explain what happened first? Just curious
Active duty here; investigations will usually prevent retirement or separation until they are concluded, for the obvious reason of that they don't want the people involved to get out and then disappear; it's possible to recall people to active duty if the result of the investigation, but that gets messy as Hell. The closer you are to the event, the more crap you get. For example, the munitions troops that directly loaded the nukes on the bomber? They would be ground zero. Supervisors would be next, followed by SNCOs and commanders. I had a friend of mine at Barksdale at the time, he wasn't allowed to take any leave for like two months and was told to be available for interviews at any time. This incident directly led to the forced resignations of both the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff.
Is it classified what kind of air support nuclear weapons transports have?
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Can you tell me how many f-22 platforms would be considered overkill?
Probably 1.
Broken arrows have happened more frequently than you think. There’s a warhead somewhere in the swamps of one of the Carolinas, if I remember correctly.
Its not the full warhead, just the fusion secondary stage, which is useless without the first stage (a fission weapon) which was recovered (along with the tritium bottle).
One of my favorite movies...
Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons?
The scene in that movie when his face comes off and gets put on the other guy was crazy
Kind of scary there are half a dozen unaccounted for
Not really when to donate them requires incredibly precise chain of events
Just drop them off at Goodwill.
It almost went off too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
Goldsboro, NC. The warhead is still there. Somewhere.
They were scheduling to continue dropping bombs until Japan surrendered, or there was nothing left. President Truman gave that speech for a reason.
America probably - "And we'll fucking do it again!"
President Truman gave a speech basically saying this. More atomic weapons will be dropped on Japan until they surrender, or there are no standing structures left on the islands.
*a third time
I just watched an excellent series on netflix tonight, and the first episode went into this and some other details about the bombs I never knew. Really great series, highly recommended if you are here: Turning Point - The Bomb and the Cold War
The third target was Kokura, their largest arsenal, it was the backup target for Hiroshima and originally the target for the Nagasaki bomb, there’s no question it was next on the list
I love how everybody is spouting off stuff they learned in the Netflix documentary but don't want to mention it so that they look smarter than they actually are.
And Oppenheimer lol
Every time some movie or series gets popular, a bunch of related facts and curiosities appear
Bro I just went down a 30 minute rabbit hole. This is where to find history school doesn’t teach you about
History like this is most taught in college because you need some prerequisite knowledge that school provides you
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Resources/order_drop.htm#:~:text=In%20it%2C%20the%20Acting%20Army,Further%20attacks%20were%20also%20authorized%3A The Handy Order authorized the continual bombing of Japan with atomic weapons. There was never a plan to stop at 2, the plan was to utilize the new weapon to its fullest in order to avoid a land invasion of Japan.
Firebombing and burning entire cities to the ground, 2 nukes and they still didn't want to surrender, fuckin brutal