Little Boy and Fat Man
On August 6th, 1945, Little Boy exploded at 8:16:02 Hiroshima time, 43 seconds after it left the Enola Gay. Robert Lewis, the co-pilot and aircraft commander, later said "If I live a hundred years, I'll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind"... Nor would the people of Hiroshima. The bomb's yield was equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT, and the deaths are estimated at 200,000 by the end of that year.
Three days later, Fat Man exploded at 11:02 AM on August 9th over Nagasaki. Yield: 22,000 tons of TNT. The steep hills of Nagasaki confined the explosion, and therefore the damage was less than Little Boy. Still, Fat Man's deaths were 140,000 by year's end.
Source: Rhodes, Richard. 2012. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Public Domain
Back to archive
Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!