Little Boy

Now, they only were bombed with two bombs.

The little boy was the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

in 1945 on August the 6th.

That was a uranium bomb.

And there's just a shadow It's like somebody was vaporized there.

It was astounding to see that.

And I was okay until I was standing under the model of Little Boy, the bomb they dropped on Hiroshima.

And because I was a nuclear weapons laboratory whistleblower, the media, I had all these movie cameras in my face and did so many television interviews and newspaper interviews.

We've enriched uranium to the point where you have weapons grade uranium.

And Little Boy is of course, one of the first atomic weapons.

And it's a very simple system.

To make an atomic bomb, you have to create a critical assembly where the geometry of the material is above your critical mass.

But the critical mass is actually, it's critical geometry, density, distribution.

There's all sorts of factors that can adjust this.

But yeah, the Little Boy weapon is very, very simple.

You have one chunk of uranium, you push it onto the other chunk of uranium using a gun barrel, they assemble.

August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay flies over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

At 8.15 a.m. local time, it drops the Little Boy atomic bomb.

And the physics of the location played a terrible, magnifying role here.

Hiroshima sits on the flat delta of the Oda River, but it is surrounded by hills.

Or what, what have I got to expect out there given the s- situation in the war?" And Carter's response, and this is from the official court of inquiry held by the Navy in August 1945 into this fiasco, he said, "Things are very quiet." This was a lie, and it was a lie that Carter knowingly told to McVay, and that's because Carter had received intelligence reports earlier that week that four Japanese submarines were active in the waters between Tinian and the Philippines.

He also didn't mention, it's kind of, kind of a small thing, but he also didn't mention to McVay that on the 24th of July, that is two days before the Indy arrived at Tinian to deliver the components for the Little Boy bomb that's gonna be dropped on Hiroshima, two days before that, a US destroyer, the Underhill, was sunk by one of these Japanese submarines.

McVay was not told any of this, and instead he was sent out on a cruiser that didn't have sonar and didn't have escorts with sonar into seas that Japanese subs were active in.

in.Yeah. That was one of my, like, jaw-dropping moments reading that, like, a few days ago you guys lost a destroyer-

It's a lot.

I think Hashimoto dying five days before McVay's exoneration, it, it, there's an interesting thing with the dates here, but it's not the only interesting thing with dates and days in this story.

And just going through the story, I was thinking to myself, "Okay, on the 6th of August, 1945, two days after the men of the Indianapolis were finally rescued, the bomb they had delivered to Tinian on their ship's mission, the Little Boy, drops from the Enola Gay in the skies above Hiroshima, detonates at about 1,000 feet or so above that city.

Hashimoto's entire family are killed in that bombing."

So aside from the insane story of what's gonna happen to this ship, the USS Indianapolis is, is really important to the general history of the Second World War.

It's the ship that carries the bomb that's gonna, it's, it's known as the Little Boy, the, the bomb that's dropped-

Yeah

... on Hiroshima.

We'll get to that.

We'll get to that.

Um, so on the 15th of July, 1945 the Indy was loaded up in San Francisco with bomb parts and two cases of uranium-235 which is the fuel for the Little Boy bomb.

Incidentally, the, the, the Fat Man bomb, the other one that's gonna be dropped on Nagasaki, uh, that was for reasons I haven't really ascertained, that was actually flown to Tinian-

This episode's ID is 996595.

Little Boy, the untested bomb that changed war.

Listen to the whole show at stream.myweirdprompts.com.

This episode was generated using artificial intelligence.

Daniel sent us this one.

He wants to go back to the beginning.

Little Boy, Hiroshima, the 6th of August, 1945.

And he's asking for three things.

At 15 minutes past eight, one of the three planes, the Enola Gay, dropped a single bomb.

The bomb was codenamed Little Boy.

It took 53 seconds to fall to its detonation height.

A bright white flash filled the sky across the horizon, brighter than anyone had ever seen.