Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 75th anniversary of Hiroshima is this Thursday.

75 years ago, on 06 Aug 1945, the Enola Gay dropped little boy on Hiroshima.

The little boy employed uranium 235 which is a fissile form of uranium. U-235 comprises only .72% of the uranium on the earth. To refine U-235, scientist built huge electro magnets in Tennessee to separate U-235 and U-238. Little boy was a gun tube bomb that drove u-235 together to make a critical mass. Even though the weight of the u-235 in the little boy bomb was substantial, less than 2.2 pounds of the 140 lbs. of u-235 was converted to energy.

Some interesting trivia on the Hiroshima bombing. People and animals, that were close enough to the blast, were literally vaporized by the blasts energy waves before the blast's shock wave hit the areas where they were located. A copper roof on a building was totally melted by energy waves before the blast wave hit the building.

The first test bomb, called 'Trinity' and exploded in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, was a plutonium implosion device. The plutonium was produced in Washington State. Final refinement and forming of the Plutonium took place at Los Alamos. Scientists had thought plutonium would work in a gun barrel bomb design, but discovered the energy waves given off by plutonium as it approached critical mass, would vaporize the plutonium. Hence the implosion design where a sphere of plutonium is squeezed together to get to critical mass.

A plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki later in Aug 1945

Once the processes are in place, Plutonium bombs cost far less to make than u-235 bombs.

Plutonium is an interesting metal. When refined, using chemical processes, it looks like a white powder. It is sintered into a solid piece. It is very toxic, very carcinogenic and oxidizes quickly in the presence of oxygen. Most all of our nations stock pile of Plutonium was produced at Hanford.

If you ever travel to the northwest, take time to tour the B reactor at Hanford. The B reactor is the worlds first full scale reactor. It is amazing that they built this reactor in less than a year. It's amazing to see what they accomplished in doing something never before undertaken. Plan ahead as tour slots are normally reserved. People come from all over the world to see the B reactor.

Currently tours are in hold due to virus, however this link should work, https://manhattanprojectbreactor.hanford.gov/index.cfm?tour=registrationStart

Killed a lot of people...saved a lot more lives on both sides in the process.

sounds like benihana for dinner on thursday. i'll wear my old "nuke em til they glow" shirt with a b52 coming out of a mushroom cloud.

Would have been better off to surround the Japs and starve them out that to have this world killer here now. It's just a matter of time before some idiot gets one and uses it.

Nagasaki was three days later on Sunday, August 9.
VJ Day six days after that on Friday, August 15. I was just short of my eight birthday. All my relation were crying and given me big hugs.

It wouldn't have made any difference. Stalin already knew all about the A-bomb from Klaus Fuchs, the spy on the inside. One of the key problems was keeping plutonium stable. We had figured out that the way to do that was to alloy it with gallium. Fuchs told the Soviets that fact and sped up their program by years. The first Soviet A-bomb test, in 1949, was a copy of the Nagasaki plutonium bomb.

By 1950, the US had about 100 plutonium bombs. Also, Hanford was soon shut down because they had produced all the plutonium we would ever need.

Little Boy, the Hiroshima bomb, was the only U-235 bomb ever detonated. We didn't bother to test the U-235 bomb because we we sure it would work.

As everyone probably knows, the U-235 bomb was delivered to Tinian by the US Indianapolis, CA-35. On the return trip it was torpedoed and sunk. The Navy was asleep at the switch and didn't notice it was overdue, in part because of the hush hush nature of the mission. Many of the crew died in the water, some eaten by sharks. The Navy made Captain McVay a scapegoat, unfairly, and he later committed suicide.

In honor of which I picked my handle.

Some years ago my son began corresponding with CA-35 survivors, who invited him to their reunion. They were heroes. One guest was the granddaughter of the Japanese sub commander, now a US citizen living in Chicago. No serving USN officers were invited.

Kept my Dad out of going to that mess after coming home from the ETO. He had orders and if things went as bad as everybody knew it would in an invasion of the Japanese Homeland, he would have been there. I'm glad it worked.

75th Anniversary of Hiroshima
History Channel
2 hour doc about the building, testing, deployment and aftermath of our nuclear weapons in WWII.
I'm sure they will show it several times in the next few days. Very well done.
You can watch it here too. https://www.history.com/specials/hiroshima-75-years-later

The last Hanford, plutonium reactor, the N, was shut down in 1986. Hanford was not soon shut down. The N reactor was ordered shut down by President Reagan due to our huge inventory of plutonium. The N reactor was a great design for plutonium production.

The B reactor closed in 1968. The two k reactors shutdown in 1970 and 1971. Other Hanford reactors are the F, H, A the two D reactors. The two main reasons for closure of these reactors was operational fatigue on the reactor parts and the fact the N reactor was so efficient.

Hanford now has the distinction of being the most polluted industrial site in the western world.

Mine too, and my uncle as well, both were on leave for two weeks, then headed for the pacific....


Where my other uncle was just getting out of a Japanese POW camp. When we learned how they treated their prisoners I would have opted for turning that whole god damned island into a sheet of glass. NO remorse for the horrible destruction the bombs caused...

Lol!

1. I like nukes.

2. We, along with the other allies held kangaroo court at nuremberg and hanged germans for bombing civvie targets. Same at tokyo with japs.

3. Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was completely unnecessary. All we had to do is blockade them and starve them out cuz they could not produce enough food to feed themselves. A few subs wouls have done the trick.

4.. World War II was the war to save bolshevism from a rightful murdering by Nazis. We should have crushed the Japanese in a year and provided War material to help crush the bolshwviks

It makes me sick to here the arrogant leftist talk about why we shouldn’t have used nuclear weapons.

I call a friend each year on the 9th so he can thank his brother.
Navigator on Bockscar.
They get together at his brothers house each year. The crews reunion.
Bunch of young kids at the time doing what had to be done.

Other facts:
Great tour at the Trinity blast site...
To calibrate the instruments at the trinity test they set off 108 tons of TNT.

They did take bets on if they would set the atmosphere on fire. It was because of a misplaced decimal point in the calculations

When asked about the use of the atom bomb the Japanese said they would have used it if they had had it.

It wasn’t the worst of WWII.

There were more civilians killed in Leningrad than in Dresden Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.

And not using them.......staving them out.....REALLY??????

The Japanese civilians were already starving. The army would have slept the kids starve......yeah. Great idea.

We had one other Gun assembly style Nuke. The 8 inch artillery round.
Never tested. Deployed.......but never tested.

And the war needed all the copper for shells so the national Silver reserves were made into wire for the U-235 production.
1,100 tons......I believe.

Need to do that to some of our cities, wipe out some democunts

"Urban renewal"

That is not what Nuremberg was about. Not even close.

Yep, plus, they started it, glad your kin got home and got to stay!

The Japs needed to be bombed. The treatment of POW’s if for no other reason. Hasbeen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ferebee


Years ago, I met Mr. Ferebee at an airshow. I got to shake his hand and he signed this photo for me.

Bob F.