Episode Details

Little Boy was the least efficient nuclear weapon ever built, throwing away 98.5% of its fuel — and it was the one Los Alamos trusted without a full-scale test. This episode traces the strange engineering of the gun-type bomb, from the death of the plutonium Thin Man design to the 72-inch cannon barrel that became the world's first deployed atomic weapon. Then it follows the morning of August 6, 1945, from Tinian's runway to the detonation 1,968 feet above Hiroshima. And it confronts the harder question: what does it mean that a 15-kiloton weapon — 3,300 times smaller than Tsar Bomba — killed over 100,000 people and permanently changed how states think about war? Yield and human consequence, it turns out, are not linearly related. The smallest weapon of the nuclear age was already enough. Key sources: • DOE/OSTI, The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 (Manhattan Project history) — https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/hiroshima.htm • DOE/OSTI, Assembling and Delivering the Uranium Bomb — https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Processes/BombTesting/assembly.html • DOE/OSTI, Debate Over How to Use the Bomb, 1945 — https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/debate.htm Episode #923680 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/923680