The Two Bombs

Maybe the only similarity of "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" is that they are both nuclear fission bombs. Almost nothing else in appearances and internally is the same, although both bombs had almost the same results.

The first bomb to be dropped was "Little Boy", which was smaller than "Fat Man" and also had less power. "Little Boy" was a gun-type nuclear weapon that involves the high speed collision of two heavy pieces of uranium-235 that would create a nuclear chain reaction, thus transforming the uranium to energy. This was accomplished by firing one piece of uranium to another by means of chemical explosives. "Little Boy"-type nuclear bombs were never fully tested prior to Hiroshima, mainly because of the simplicity of the design and that uranium was in scarce quantity back then. As a side note, Canada supplied a lot of the uranium used by the Americans and still do today.

The second bomb, "Fat Man", was a much more complicated and destructive bomb. The only reason why it killed less people was because some of the population have been evacuated to rural areas due to previous conventional bombings. The bomb was an implosion-type nuclear device using plutonium instead of uranium to create nuclear fission. It had a plutonium core that was surrounded by a sphere of explosives. In "Fat Man", there were 32 pairs of detonators that were located on the surface of the explosives. They were fired simultaneously to create a huge inward force to the plutonium core, which compressed rapidly until nuclear fission.Unlike "Little Boy", a full-scale test of an implosion-type nuclear weapon happened before the type being used on Japan. The Trinity test, as it was called, took place in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16th, 1945, in the middle of the desert.

The Trinity Test

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