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Studs Terkel: What did General LeMay have in mind with the third one? You and your crew are going to fly it.” I said, “Yes sir.” I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back, to bring it right on out to Tinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over. He said, “Where is it?” I said, “Over in Utah.” He said, “Get it out here. He said, “You got another one of those damn things?” I said, “Yes sir.” Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. See, the first bomb went off and they didn’t hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. Paul Tibbets: Unknown to anybody else – I knew it, but nobody else knew – there was a third one. Studs Terkel: Why did they drop the second one, the Boxcar on Nagasaki? I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we’d be doing that I thought, yes, we’re going to kill a lot of people, but by God we’re going to save a lot of lives. Of course, that applied to airplanes and people. Maybe I did make a mistake: maybe I was too damned assured.Īt 29 years of age I was so shot in the ass with confidence I didn’t think there was anything I couldn’t do. weapon would explode with a yield of 300 kilotons of TNT”.I can’t think of any mistakes I’ve made. In comparison, today’s thermonuclear weapons are much more powerful. It is estimated that these two bombs killed roughly 200,000 people in the near term, with more dying in the following years from cancer. One frightening aspect of nukes today is that they’re many times more powerful than the Little Boy bomb: “The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were comparable to explosions of about 15 to 20 kilotons of TNT. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible”. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. “I knew when I got the assignment”, he told a reporter in 2005, “it was going to be an emotional thing. In a 1975 interview, Paul Tibbets said: “I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did. Tibbets, en route to Guam, felt a 2.5g shockwave driven before a kaleidoscopic pillar of smoke and debris. 31,000 feet above (9,500 meters), and 10 and a half miles away from them, Paul W. local time, poised above Hiroshima’s Aioi Bridge, Little Boy dropped.
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The bomb, named “Little Boy”, was anything but snout-nosed, and weighing in at 9,700 pounds (4,400 kg), it resembled nothing more than an obese metal baseball bat.Īt 8:15 a.m. Rather than isobutyl methacrylate or its more famous kin, napalm, this bomb was packed with two masses of highly enriched uranium-235. Unlike the bombs with which the US Air Force had scorched Japan for roughly a year, this bomb was not filled with the usual incendiaries. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb.
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The Enola Gay was a bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line. Colonel Paul Tibbets waving from the Enola Gay’s cockpit to get reporters to stand clear of the propellers prior to engine start, before taking off for the bombing of Hiroshima.