#76 - Operation Alsos

What this episode covers

Of course, while the bomb was being designed, they had to figure out how they were going to deliver it. And WHO was going to deliver it. Way back in March 1944, the US Army Air Force, with William Sterling "Deak” Parsons and his team at Los Alamos, developed two bomb models and began testing them with B-29 bombers. Thin Man, named for President Roosevelt, was the design carrying the plutonium gun, while Fat Man, named for Winston Churchill, was an implosion prototype. Emilio Segrè, Italian-American physicist, had designed a lighter, smaller uranium bomb was later dubbed Little Boy, Thin Man’s brother. Thin Man, the one named for FDR, was eliminated four months later because of the predetonation problem. Which is ironic, because FDR himself also was eliminated a few months after that. The problems with figuring out how to create a reliable chain reaction meant the estimates of when a bomb could be delivered that Bush had given the President in 1943 would have to be revised. The new timetable was presented to Roosevelt’s Army Chief of Staff General Marshall by Groves on 7 August 1944, two months after the Allied landings on Normandy on 6 June. It said that small implosion weapons using uranium or plutonium would be ready in the second quarter of 1945, if experiments proved satisfactory. Groves was more confident that a uranium gun bomb could be delivered by 1 August 1945, and another one or two more by the end of that year. Marshall and Groves acknowledged that German surrender might take place by summer 1945, making it likely that Japan would be the atomic bomb’s first target. Expenditures on the Manhattan Project had reached $100 million a month by mid-1944. No one was sure that Groves’ deadline of 1 August 1945 could really be reached. The Germans were by then in retreat on all fronts and the Japanese were being pushed back in the Pacific it wasn't certain that a weapon would be ready for use in the war at all. Meanwhile, just in case a bomb was ready in time, they needed to start working out how they would deliver it. The US Army Air Force started training in September 1944 at Wendover Field Air Force Base in western Utah Where Chrissy won at craps when she was 21. On the border of Nevada and Utah. Near the Bonneville Salt Flats Raceway, about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City. BTW, Wendover Air Base is still there today. It’s a civil air base. But it’s one of the most intact World War II training airfields. Numerous films and television shows have been filmed using Wendover Field, including The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), Con Air (1995), Mulholland Falls (1996), Independence Day (1996), Hulk (2003) and The Core (2003). Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Tibbets began drilling the 393rd Bombardment Squadron of the 509th Composite Wing in test drops with 5500-pound orange dummy bombs, nicknamed pumpkin bombs, on the Great Salt Lake. Not to be confused with the pumpkin bombs thrown by the Green Goblin. These had the same ballistic characteristics as Fat Man. Tibbets was recognized as the best bomber pilot in the Air Force. He had led the first B-17 bombing mission from England over occupied Europe. Then he had flown Eisenhower to his command post in Gibraltar before the Allied landings in northwest Africa and conducted the first bombing raids there afterwards. More recently, he had been a test pilot for Boeing’s new B-29 Superfortress and worked with the physics department of the University of New Mexico to determine how well the B-29 could defend itself against fighter attack. BTW - the Superfortress was the single most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, exceeding the cost of the Manhattan Project by between $1 and 1.7 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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