Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 1945
Hiroshima
Tibbet in the Enola Gay
On August 6, 1945 at 815 in the morning an American B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, dropped the world's first deployed atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Colonel Paul Tibbet was the pilot of the plane that dropped the bomb known as "Little Boy".It was dropped by parachute at 8:15 in the morning. It exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying 5 square miles of the city. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city. It killed 80,000 people immediately, and tens of more thousands more would later die of radiation exposure.
Nagasaki
Mushroom clouds from Hiroshima (L) and Nagaski (R)
Three days later a second B-29, Bockscar, dropped another bomb, “Fat man”, on the city of Nagasaki. The original target, Kokura was covered in thick clouds so they had to resort to the secondary target of Nagasaki. The pilot Charles Sweeney dropped the bomb at 11:02 that morning. This bomb weighed 10,000 pounds and was built to produce a 22-kiloton blast. Only 40,000 people lost their lives even though this bomb was more powerful than the “Little Boy”; some believe it was because Nagasaki was nestled in the Narrow valleys between mountains so it reduced the bombs effect and limited the destruction to 2.6 miles.
http://www.history.com/topics/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki
http://www.wingsoverkansas.com/features/article.asp?id=848
http://www.wingsoverkansas.com/features/article.asp?id=848