Little
Boy and Fat Man
 Little
Boy was the first nuclear weapon used in warfare. It exploded
approximately 1,800 feet over Hiroshima, Japan, on the morning of
August 6, 1945, with a force equal to 13,000 tons of TNT. Immediate
deaths were between 70,000 to 130,000.
Little Boy was dropped from a B-29 bomber piloted by U.S.
Army Air Force Col. Paul W. Tibbets. Tibbets had named the plane
Enola Gay after his mother the night before the atomic attack.
Fat Man was the second nuclear weapon used in warfare. Dropped
on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, Fat Man devastated
more than two square miles of the city and caused approximately
45,000 immediate deaths.
Major Charles W. Sweeney piloted the B-29, #77 that dropped Fat
Man. After the nuclear mission, #77 was christened Bockscar
after its regular Command Pilot, Fred Bock.
While Little Boy was a uranium gun-type device, Fat Man
was a more complicated and powerful plutonium implosion weapon that
exploded with a force equal to 20 kilotons of TNT.
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