The story is a little more comoplicated - and interesting! = than that...The U.S. expected to have another atomic bomb ready for use in the third week of August, with three more in September and a further three in October...and 15 by Christmas 1945. Production was slow because as of the end of the war only the A and B "pilot" reactors at Hanford were working, the C "production" reactor was six months late coming online, and D wasn't to be finished until 1948. A total of at least six complete Little Boy cases were sent to Tinian; one, L1, was assembled, weighted and practise-dropped on the 23rd of July....followed by four more. This means the "live" Hiroshima bomb, L11, was casing number six used. These were the "bomb units" plural that the Indianapolis carried to Tinian along with the U-235 "bullet" element. Logic would say that there were at least 11 cases if they were numbered L1-11 - but at present I can only evidentially account for the six described above. There were two sets of Little Boy mechanical innards delivered to Tinian, and the Hiroshima Bomb was assembed from the best bits of both...leaving one full set of innards - and as we've seen several more unaccounted-for casings! There were also two uranium "targets" - the fixed element in the "uraniun gun" - sent, but only one of the much larger "bullet" elements. So as of VJ Day there was another complete Little Boy Bomb on Tinian, just minus its U-235 "bullet". Incidently, there were a total of four test-dropped Fat Man casings before August 9th. This is in additionto the PUMPKIN devices, dummy Fat Man sized and shaped bombs filled with conventional explosives that were dropped on live Japanese targets when training in the mission profile. Apparently there was at least one more unused Fat Man casing remaining on Tinian.
Hello,Philo Roadking, That is the story I searched for. I will print it out. Wonder from where you got all this, Thanks, Gerard Jeuken ,Holland
Gerard - from several locations over the years; the info on Hanford from a graph and accompanying caption when searching for the production rate of plutonium for a What-If on AHF some years ago, the detail about the complete sets of Little Boy mechanical internals when searching for information on how they STOPPED the "uranium gun" from pre-detonating I.E. all the arming and safety devices (it had a number of mechanical and electronic safety features built in to stop the uranium "bullet" impacting the "target" IN FLIGHT! several of these modified from P51 tail radar)...and the detail on the number of casings sent to Tinian when researching for a What-If thread on ww2f two months ago, This latter interested me greatly; I'd known for years (since I first saw the World At War) that Paul Tibbets had put the 509th Composite through a rigorous "training programme" once he had been told the likely mission profile in detail...but until that recently I didn't know WHAT that training consisted of. It appears they dropped very large conventional bombs weighing the same as the finished products on missions over Japan and nearby islands replicating the expected mission profile as closely as possible, and dropped some of the empty "finished" casings in the middle of large raids on Japan where their remains would be lost in the destruction. It allowed the 509th to practice carrying large, heavy munitions over the identical distances....and to study for themselves the effects of windage etc. on the "live" (empty) munitions when aimed and dropped from altitude.
There's some discussion here about post Nagasaki plans and the potential future nuclear bombs etc... https://podbay.fm/p/dan-snows-history-hit/e/1628481600 23mins audio... SHOW NOTES The second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki is less well known than the one a few days earlier on Hiroshima, but was it more influential in forcing the Japanese to surrender? To find out who exactly ordered it and why Dan talked to Harvard's Frederik Logevall. He discusses the debates that rage between historians as to whether Nagasaki was necessary and how much pressure there was for a third bomb. On the anniversary of the strike, it is a conversation with powerful contemporary echoes.
