RE: Sometimes ya just gotta nuke em
At 8:33 2/3/96, "A. Padgett Peterson, P.E. Information Security" <PADGETT@hobbe wrote:
Tim rote:
At 4:12 AM 2/3/96, Rich Graves wrote:
Who holds up the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as great victories against tyranny? Since you ask, I do.
And the biggest secret of the war was that "Fat Man" was the *last* A-bomb we had or could build for about a year (had taken several *years* to separate enough fissionable material for the three via two entirely different processes).
To me this is the great strength of the USA: given a theoretical problem, we will develop a hundred different solutions, try them all in parallel, and at least one will work.
I agree - Not only were there two different separation methods but the two bombs dropped on Japan were of different designs (I think that the Hiroshima bomb was the same design as the land test version and the Nagasaki one was the untested design [so that if used, there would have been a tested design for the first drop]).
On Mon, 5 Feb 1996, Robert A. Rosenberg wrote:
I agree - Not only were there two different separation methods but the two bombs dropped on Japan were of different designs (I think that the Hiroshima bomb was the same design as the land test version and the Nagasaki one was the untested design [so that if used, there would have been a tested design for the first drop]).
Actually, it was the other way round. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was an enriched uranium gun type bomb; the devices exploded at Trinity and Nagasaki were imploded plutonium devices. The Little-Boy design was not tested before being dropped as 1) the design was so (theoretically) simple that if it didn't work, nothing would, and 2) there wasn't enough enriched uranium to make two of them. Simon p.s. Everybody interested in this subject should read "The making of the Atom Bomb" by Richard Rhodes; it's an amazing book, well worth its Pulitzer. The section dealing with Hiroshima in the seconds and days after the explosion is incredibly painful to read.
participants (2)
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Robert A. Rosenberg -
Simon Spero