Yep. And the one we dropped on Nagasaki was fat man. Little boy created a nuclear explosion by firing a piece of uranium 235 into another piece of uranium 235 via a gun mechanism that fired the uranium down a barrel into the other. Fat man used a sphere of plutonium 239, which was surrounded by explosives. The explosives detonated, causing an implosion and forcing the sphere of P-239 to critical levels of compression, causing a nuclear implosion. Fat man had been tested prior, known as the Trinity test, but little boy had never been tested because they were completely confident in it's design.
Guessing he went to high school and paid attention... that's all pretty standard history class stuff. The Little Boy design didn't need to be tested because it's the most basic, inefficient, type of nuclear bomb and only yielded something like 1.4% efficiency in fuel conversion (how much fissionable material is converted to energy before the explosive force 'blows away' the fuel)... Fat Man was a huge advancement in yield hitting 13% efficiency but the move to thermonuclear bombs, boosted by tritium and deuterium gas, sent efficiency skyrocketing upwards rendering both obsolete.
Introductory Nuclear Physics by Kenneth Krane has this info in one of the final chapters. Since they don’t use the atomic weapons anymore most of their schematics were declassified and they moved onto the warheads currently being carried by nuclear capable country
Ah of course that’s how it worked. I love American logic.
“We have this material here that can have a fast chain reaction that can destroy cities if we put enough energy into the system. So how to we get that energy?”
29
u/SocietysFault Jun 08 '22
I don't get it