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. Enola Gay was a four-engine heavy bomber that had undergone a number of modifications, including reinforcements to its bomb bay. 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. 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. It contained several major components of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber used in the atomic mission that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan.
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. This past exhibition, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, told the story of the role of the Enola Gay in securing Japanese surrender. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb.
This was the first of 7 Top-10 UK singles for the group their only US hit was 'If You Leave,' which was written for the 1985 movie Pretty In Pink.
Obvious choice for us, really.' OMD is the shortened form of the band's full name: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. 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. The most famous and influential single bomber was Enola Gay. 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.