Do you have photos of a loaded Little Boy pumpkin? I do not trust photos of rusted out shells without provenance. Take this as an example-
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In September 1944, Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets selected Wendover Air Force Base as the training site for the 509th Composite Group, the handpicked B-29 unit that would deliver the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The 509th Composite Group was activated on December 17, 1944 and included over 1700 officers and men, including the First Technical Detachment, a team of civilian and military scientists.
In January 1945, Colonel Clifford Heflin assummed command of the 216th Base Unit as the new base commander. In addition to overseeing all activities at Wendover, Heflin also designated two groups within the 216th to assist with the Manhattan Project. Named Project W-47, the Flight Test Section and the Special Ordnance Detachment helped weaponize the atomic bomb by collaborating with Los Alamos scientists to test out prototype bombs in the shape of Little Boy and Fat Man to furnish information on ballistics, electrical fusing and detonators, release mechanisms, and flying characteristics of the aircraft.
Wendover proved to be an excellent place to practice these "pumpkin bomb" drops as they were soon referred to. The unique shape of the atomic bombs required aircrews to learn new bomb drop techniques. Hundreds of practice bombs were dropped from B-29s as engineers from Los Alamos sought to determine the correct weight distribution and shape of the aerodynamically unique bombs. Special pits were also constructed with hydraulic lifts to hoist the huge bombs into the bomb bay. Between October 1944 and August 1945, 155 test units were dropped on targets surrounding the airfield at Wendover.
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http://www.atomicheritage.org/location/wendover-ut
http://www.atomicheritage.org/sites/def ... 20Bomb.jpg
Well alrighty then. Period 1940s crane truck, yellow and black LB ballistic confirmation test weapon. So they must have had LB shapes before the Germans. Except....
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However, a problem arose when the ground crew tried to load the first pumpkin bomb into the B-29 bomb bay. Although the bay had been altered to hold a large atomic bomb, at five feet in diameter, the Fat Man facsimile was larger than the clearance between the open bomb bay and the tarmac. So it just would not fit beneath the plane to allow it to be loaded.
Charles Sweeney discussed this issue with the ground crew and the weapons engineer and they finally concluded that the only thing they could do at the moment was raise the nose and slip the bomb under the front of the B-29. A new base at the time, Wendover, really didn't have the cranes needed to lift up the front end of a plane, so the crew threw tarps over each of the rear horizontal stabilizers on the B-29, and put several men (six to eight), pulling down on each tarp. The strength of these men tipped the tail of the B-29 down, which lifted the nose up in the air, providing the clearance for the ground crew to slip the pumpkin below the bomb bay. (The length of the plane pivoted on the main wheels like a seesaw). When they set the nose back down again, they lifted the bomb into the bay and secured it to the aircraft.3, 4
Army engineers found a long term solution to bomb loading by designing and building bomb pits. However, the ground crew had to keep using this tipping method for bomb loading of the B-29s for two months before the bomb pits were completed. Then the crew could lower the bomb into the pit using hydraulics, back the B-29 over the pit, and with the hydraulics, lift the bomb up into the bomb bay. Wendover Air Field ended up with three separate bomb pits. There was another pit built at Tinian, and then a fifth pit was constructed on Iwo Jima for the Hiroshima mission.
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http://worldwar2headquarters.com/HTML/j ... bombs.html
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Building The Base
On July 29, 1941, the installation at Wendover became a subpost of Fort Douglas, Salt Lake City, and additional land acquisitions approved by Congress brought the total area of the base to 1,822,000 acres. The total site ranged from 18 to 36 miles wide and 86 miles long and was soon hailed as the largest bombing and gunnery range in the world. Nonetheless, life at Wendover was primitive: the drinking water was bad, infrastructure was limited, rats invaded barracks, and sand managed to find its way into everything.
The first Army unit to be assigned to Wendover moved to the desert post on August 12, 1941 with a detachment of one officer and ten enlisted men. Later that month, another 37 men arrived and started setting up targets on the salt desert for training purposes. The base would remain idle until March 28, 1942, when the Army activated Wendover as a B-17 and B-24 heavy bombardment training base to prepare for World War II.
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http://www.atomicheritage.org/location/wendover-ut
If the base was so new that they didn't have cranes capable of lifting the nose of the B-29, then that crane _lifting a Little Boy BDU_ cannot be of Wendover in the period described. Conversely, the base was not 'new' in 1945 as it had already served as a site for other large aircraft and was considered the world's largest extant bombing range.
Somebody is lying, twice. And I don't like lies. Makes me suspicious.
WRT the bomb casings themselves, here is what is unusual:
In Friedrich Georg's _Hitler's Miracle Weapons, V1_, on Page 78, there is an image of models of atomic weapon shapes being tested in the Ferdinand Graf Von Zeppelin wind tunnels (their version of NASA Ames/Dryden). One of these looks incredibly akin to Gadget. One looks like Fat Man. And one looks like Little Boy. Shrug, Space Aliens giving both sides the same weapons design?
Yet on March 11, 1943, 'Southern Stuttgart' (Ruit, the home of the FGZ) was heavily bombed and the test center badly damaged. More raids on February 21st and March 2nd (550 bombers each) and then another 800 plane raid, in November (don't know the date), of 1944 all but obliterated the facility. So if they were testing bomb casings in the wind tunnels there, it was not after February 1944.
Why do their bombs look like our bombs, before we were even building bomb casings?
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Document 45: Memorandum from Major General L. R. Groves to Chief of Staff, July 30, 1945, Top Secret, Sanitized Copy
Source: RG 77, MED Records, Top Secret Documents, File no. 5
With more information on the Alamogordo test available, Groves provided Marshall with more detail on the destructive power of atomic weapons. Barton J. Berstein has observed that Groves’s recommendation that troops could move into the “immediate explosion area” within a half hour demonstrates the prevalent lack of knowledge of the dangers of nuclear weapons effects.[37] Groves also provided the schedule for the delivery of the weapons: the components of the gun-type bomb to be used on Hiroshima had arrived on Tinian, while the parts of the second weapon to be dropped were leaving San Francisco. By the end of November over ten weapons would be available, presumably in the event the war had continued.
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http://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/
Ten Bombs by November means you are either dumping a lot of hot-fuel in the Hanford plutonium effort. Or those '560 kilos of Uranium Oxide' are in fact 560 kilos of U235, just like the Japanese military officers wrote on the little tags which U-234 second officer Pfaff saw them doing in Kiel.
So... Sixty kilos in the Little Boy = 9.3 bombs. 560 kilos of Yellow Cake doesn't. It's a drop in the bucket for a single bomb. So it wasn't U238. Because the Japanese needed TONS of U238 for a viable weapon, unless they had a reactor (and cool down time, even then).
EITHER WAY, the statement stands that there was ONE gun bomb on Tinian but components for more implosion weapons, including the first _U235 implosion designs_ were on the way. The Fat Man casings were likely needed for the U235 implosion weapon as well.
Read this-
http://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/45.pdf
Thoroughly. I cannot cut and paste the required text at the end of the first page but it breaks down the types and the methods being used, including the provision of enhanced yield devices and hybrid Pu239/U235 weapons as well as an interesting assertion that the existing stockpile could be 'upgraded' to a higher yield without much delay whereas it presently represented 'two big and one lesser' yielded weapons, in the pipeline.
Here is what is happening: From U-234 and Heinz Schlicke, we have a new fusing method (better detonation efficiencies) and likely the provision of the first knowledge of boosted weapons such as the German tacticals included to keep weapon mass and casing size down. Using Tritium and/or LD6 to enhance the neutron flux counts during what would otherwise be a high function fizzle.
This would allow for higher yields with relatively little change in the weapon design, simply because you could drill holes in the wad and place insulated pockets of booster. Just as Luis Alvarez did with Gadget.
Again, there was ONE gun bomb in inventory, with no discussion of followon gun bomb deliveries through November 1946, for the simple reason that that Gun weapon, which yielded out to 17-21KT, matching Fat Man, did so due to the sheer amount of U235 employed, even though only about 12% went RCR.
The Germans had a simple weapon which they held onto as a political Dead Pledge and that bomb, in it's entirety, became the Little Boy.
Had this not been the case, the U.S. effort, which was short of weapon fuel, would have never put that much U235 into Little Boy to begin with. And would have stripped a German weapon of it's fuel, to hot load the Hanford breeder pile and made Plutonium around the clock. Instead, they got BOTH a working bomb and 560 kilos of U235 which the Germans couldn't use because they had no fast, high payload, bomber capable of delivering same against well defended targets like London or Moscow.
The Americans didn't resort to such scavenging because they did not have (by May 1945) they had Schlicke's German Solution for IR based implosion detonators or boosting (or both) to get the neutron flux counts high enough to make plutonium implosion work before the bomb blew itself to pieces.
It is thus interesting that not only did the arrival of U-234 preface the sudden availability of fuel (keeping in mind, you have to let Plutonium laced fuel rods 'cool' for about six months before you can chemically extract it) but also of all these new alternatives for strong/weak yields and hybrid warheads. Indicating someone had gained knowledge of boosting that the Germans, 'not having a serious atombombe program' had had to come up with on their own, after those good Catholic Boys, as the Austrian scientists, basically pulled out and/or sabotaged the SS program in Austria.
A gun bomb is simple to fuse, it just takes a lot of fuel to get useful yields. Plutonium cannot be because it will dissemble using simple projectile/target collision and MUST use implosion (explosives on both sides of the wad) instead. This introduces timing problems to ensure the explosives detonate precisely together.
The Germans, with their huge leads in molecular chemistry, could afford a gun weapon as they did better work separating U235 from U238 than is commonly acknowledged. Von Ardenne's betatron with capture tank was 20% more efficient than the best Calutrons we had running.
And this happened, not least, because Goering FUNDED IGF ALMOST A YEAR SOONER (1941) to whatever method (gas diffusion) was underway at Buna 102 in Monawitz. As Paul Harteck's comments on what he saw there as an SS 'consultant' strongly imply that the 800 million Reichsmark facility was the German Oakridge equivalent.
None of which changes the fact that we dropped a German bomb on a Japanese city filled with civilians who didn't have to die when even the scholars are divided on whether it was the bombs or the Soviet invasion of Manchuria which finally scared the Emperor into surrendering.
See, the Japanese faced the same problem Churchill feared with the U-Boat menace: total lockdown as embargoed blockade of all sea transported strategic resources (oil, bauxite and manpower). Something like 3-4 million Japanese soldiers were in stuck in China as an occupational army because they simply could not walk upon the sub infested waters to get home.
But the U.S. fleets were not exclusively submarines but also included large carrier battle groups. Which means that their tactical aircraft could also venture, far and wide, inland to drop bridges and poison food crops. Preventing growth and distribution of food, turning the screws on the pressure.
But not killing 110,000 people in a single week and 200,000 in the next decade.
The most common, facile, arguments that are now used:
1. The Japanese 'to the last man!' defenses of Okinawa and Iwo Jima scared us off a conventional Olympic/Coronet invasion.
2. We wanted to 'impress' the Russians.
3. We were facing political investigation of a 3 billion dollar weapons program fraud at home.
4. That we had a new kill toy and were aching to play with it.
Thus all become meaningless. And immoral. When you realize the atom bomb was not even of our design or making. It was German. Given what we were finding in the ruins of the Reich.
Given that the Japanese were GOING NOWHERE, flatbacked and trapped in their islands like 'The Prisoner'.
Given these were civilian, non combatant, targets who could neither defend themselves nor were responsible for Pearl Harbor, as an attack on a miliary installation; there was absolutely no excuse for what was done on August 6/9, 1945.
None.
And that is why it is so critically important, to peel back the lies of the Allied Myth. For not only will it redeem the German people as being unwilling to do what we did, with truly desperate need (giant Norwegian airfields, converted He-177B bombers, The New York Mission as a one way V4 trip).
But also that, in revealing the true provenance of the U.S. atomic arsenal, we will be forced to look into a very dark part of our souls and see that WE HAD WON ANYWAY. We did not need to use atomic weapons, for any reason, against another human population. We still don't. But as atomics become easier, a lot of supposed threat countries are going to start looking at nukes as viable ways to keep from being mauled by U.S. conventional forces.
And that's a road of Atomic A2AD we cannot afford to go down because of the realities of Middle Eastern religious oil politics (Iran) and globalist economics (Beijing is only 500nm from Pyongyang).
Heisenberg's conversation with Bohr indicated he had no idea how a "bomb" might be constructed or set off; as of 1942 he was still running with the idea that a "bomb" was a reactor allowed to run explosively critical.
