Timeline for Why did the United States drop a uranium bomb instead of a plutonium bomb on Hiroshima?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 26, 2023 at 20:34 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | Why not? I've heard it said that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were different because the US - or the West in general - wanted to use both cities as 'guinea pigs' and in the real world, why might that be a problem? Should the need to inflict staggering damage on an enemy somehow restrict a combatant to using the same weapon every time? How would that not also be to deny the world's only chance for hugely important research that could never elsewise be repeated? | |
| Feb 24, 2023 at 21:24 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | Can you say why this matters? Why you do you, or should we mind? Broadly, there were logistical reasons such as which bomb was ready first, and technical reasons such as testing which kind of bomb might cause more damage, with what side effects? If that's your real Question, please say so. If that's not it, what is? | |
| Feb 23, 2023 at 18:49 | history | edited | WillO | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 349 characters in body
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| Feb 23, 2023 at 4:52 | comment | added | Mark | @JonCuster, but bomb #4 was a fair ways off. Depending on who you ask, the gap between bomb #3 and #4 was somewhere between three and ten weeks, with bombs coming off the production line about once a week after that. | |
| S Feb 23, 2023 at 4:43 | history | suggested | gparyani | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Title can be confused as "why did they drop a bomb [at all]" instead of what the body is asking
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| Feb 23, 2023 at 4:42 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Feb 23, 2023 at 4:43 | |||||
| Feb 22, 2023 at 18:24 | comment | added | Peter Cordes | Given what you seem to be really asking, I think a clearer title would be "Why was an untested uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima?" | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 17:04 | comment | added | Jon Custer | @matt_black - to quote from B Cameron Reed 2014 Phys. Scr. 89 108003 - "On the evening of 9 August, Japanese diplomatic messages began indicating a willingness to surrender. This prompted President Truman to order a halt to any more atomic bombings; the next bomb, another Fat Man, would have been ready for use around 17 August." In fact, the Pu core was already on its way to Tinian. | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 16:09 | comment | added | Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight | @WS2 the original Thin Man gun design (U235) was too big to fit in anything but a Lancaster. Little Boy was much smaller and lighter because someone realized that instead of an off the shelf-ish gun design, one whose barrel only needed to fire once could be made significantly shorter and thinner walled than one that needed to last thousands of shots before being serviced. Little Boy was able to fit into a B29 without major difficulty. | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 14:53 | comment | added | matt_black | The assumption that they had enough plutonium or enough components for a second plutonium bomb is probably wrong. | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 14:27 | comment | added | WS2 | Was there not also an issue about weight? Did not the early prototype weigh 10 tons? The story I've heard is that since in 1945 the only aircraft that could take a ten-ton bomb load was a Lancaster, and as the USAF didn't have any Lancasters, they would have had to sub the operation to the RAF. And given that a large part of the team at Los Alamos was made up of the so-called "Tube Alloys" team from Cambridge who were moved lock-stock-and-barrel to North America in 1942, heaven forbid it should have been seen more as a British operation than an American! | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 12:37 | comment | added | MCW♦ | Documenting preliminary research will improve both the probability of an answer and the quality of the answer(s) | |
| Feb 22, 2023 at 7:22 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Feb 22, 2023 at 1:35 | answer | added | Pieter Geerkens | timeline score: 59 | |
| Feb 21, 2023 at 23:32 | comment | added | Steve Bird | I suspect that it was simply that the Little Boy bomb was completed first and was, therefore, available to be deployed first. | |
| S Feb 21, 2023 at 23:22 | review | First questions | |||
| Feb 21, 2023 at 23:26 | |||||
| S Feb 21, 2023 at 23:22 | history | asked | WillO | CC BY-SA 4.0 |