Implosion Bomb Cross Section (drawn to scale) This was the design of the device named "Gadget" that was detonated on July 16, 1945. "Gadget" was identical to the device named "Fat Man" which was detonated at Nagasaki, Japan.Too bad it wasn’t ready to use againts Germany first.
My uncle served in the European Theater and was in transit to the South Pacific when the bomb was dropped. Good chance it saved his and countless other American lives.
So what did we do with Klaus Fuchs?
Implosion Bomb Cross Section (drawn to scale) This was the design of the device named "Gadget" that was detonated on July 16, 1945. "Gadget" was identical to the device named "Fat Man" which was detonated at Nagasaki, Japan.
Cut-away view showing the implosion bomb lens block arrangement. Lens and booster blocks are combined in this diagram.“It’s a boy.”
This is an excellent documentary detailing "Trinity" and the subsequent atom bomb tests by the United States during the Cold War.Trinity - Birth of the Atomic Age
At 5:30 AM on the morning of July 16, 1945, the pre-dawn stillness of the New Mexico desert was shattered by the most momentous, man-made explosion of all time. At a site called Trinity, a plutonium bomb was assembled and atop a 100 foot steel tower.
The bomb was detonated, producing an intense flash and a fireball that expanded to 600 meters in two seconds. The explosive power was equivalent to 18.6 kilotons of TNT. It grew to a height of more than 12 kilometers, boiling up in the shape of a mushroom. Forty seconds later, the blast of air from the bomb reached the observation bunkers, along with a long and deafening roar of sound. And so began the ATOMIC AGE...
The uranium gun weapon, “Little Boy Bomb”, was a simple design and scientists were confident it would without testing. The “Fat Man”, or implosion bomb, was a more efficient design, using plutonium instead of uranium. Inside the very center of the bomb was an initiator, surrounded by a sphere of plutonium.
This sphere was encased within a set of symmetrically located, high explosive lenses, creating an implosion which forced the plutonium into itself, attaining critical mass. The blast instantly raised temperatures to ten million degrees, releasing a force of a million pounds of pressure, vaporizing the tower and desert life within half a mile.
The intensity of light was sufficient to cause temporary blindness to an observer half a mile away. Development and construction of the atomic bomb was the most closely guarded secret in scientific history. This was a culmination of centuries of step-by-step advances in the scientific quest to learn about the inner workings of the atom.
Finally, in July 16, 1945, a practical atomic bomb was completed. The first test, code named “Trinity” was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The “Trinity” test confirmed the implosion design used for the Fat Man bomb exploded over Nagasaki. Long before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States in late 1941 established a secret program, which came to be known as the Manhattan Project, to develop an atomic bomb, a powerful explosive nuclear weapon.
The aim of the project, directed by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, was to build an atom bomb before Germany did. After Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Harry S. Truman became president and inherited the bomb-development program. At this point, the new weapon had two purposes. First, it could be used to force Japan to surrender.
Second, possession of the bomb would enable the United States, and not the USSR, to control postwar policy. On August 29, 1949, the Russians detonated their first atomic bomb. This event, coming five years earlier than anyone in the West had predicted, was largely the result of one man, Klaus Fuchs.
Fuchs, a Los Alamos physicist, had passed detailed blue prints of the original Trinity design to the Russians. With the emergence of the USSR as a nuclear rival, the United States believed it had strong motivation for intensifying its program of nuclear testing.
http://www.vce.com/trinity_birth.html
"Gadget" were raised up to the top of the tower for the final assembly.I can’t attest to the accuracy of this statement but Oppenheimer’s younger brother (Frank - who was present at the Trinity test) simply said “It worked”.
And it saved milions of lives, both Japanese and American. More Japanese died in the fire raids we were conducting via convenstional bombing and more would have died. Operation Olympic, the invasion of the Japanese mainland, would have resulted in millions of casualties.
from: http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/JapansStruggle/index.html#
I found the above while doing some reading on history. didn’t sit right with me. The site is a fascinating source of WWII history. I usually consider this source credible but two things struck me.
1) the source of the information they based the opinion on. Of course they were going to surrender...........
2) Wasn’t the invasion of Japan planned for September or October, thus making the Dec 31 date a moot point? Willing to be corrected on this.
Since when is the "Trinity" site in Nevada?
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I am still relieved that America developed the atomic bomb and used it against Japan to end WWII. An invasion of mainland Japan would have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives.
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There is also good reason to believe the use of the A-Bomb also saved the lives of many of the Japanese people. Without something so dramatic, the Japanese may have fought to the death.
The Japanese military leadership committed many atrocities, but the Japanese people were being dragged along into the maelstrom. It would have been very unpleasant having to fight them, because the loss of life would have seemed like genocide.
After the war, the United States helped the Japanese rebuild. Now, the Japanese are among our most loyal allies. They are also leaders in developing technology. The rebuilding of Japan has been a “win-win” proposition.
My great uncle worked in the Kaiser shipyards in California during World War II, and many many years later, he told a story to us about being offered an opportunity with a bunch of other welders to volunteer for a project which would take them out of state for about a month, pay them triple wages, but they had to be vetted and their backgrounds checked.
He told us that after being approved for this special welding project, they were put on a bus with blacked out windows and driven for God-knows-how-long, until they arrived at their destination, which was a bunch of tents out in the middle of nowhere, looked like a desert. They were provided with all the necessities, given blueprints, and told to build a new secret experimental ‘radio tower’, which they did, right to spec.
Back on the bus after about a month, and he said he had no idea what kind of damn radio tower they had built until after he saw pictures in LIFE magazine about the Manhattan Project (after the War), and he realized that it was the tower used at the Trinity test that he had helped assemble.
I’m very proud of him.
Had this happened, a whole lot of people running around now wouldn't be running around now.
Here is a link. It is a long read.
Military history ping