All of the Photos
For those looking for a more pure photographic experience, here are all of the nuclear weapons photographs of American Nukes. Click on any photo to enlarge and then you can toggle the thumbnail and caption options.
A replica of the Gadget at the Nuclear Museum in Albuquerque.
A replica of the Gadget at the Atomic Museum in Las Vegas. They claim theirs is the most accurate replica but in what way I do not know.
This recreation of the Gadget, as the scientists named the device, is shown here in this full-scale recreation being lifted to the top of the 100-foot tall tower. Located at the Nuclear Museum in Albuquerque.
Just down the road from the K-25 History Center, the American Museum of Science and Energy has their own Little Boy, which is illuminated in various ways in synch to a video presentation.
An image from the new galleries at the K-25 History Center at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the site where uranium was purified for use in Little Man and for further processing into plutonium in Washington state. The display emphasizes the many other locations (in addition to the famous Los Alamos) that worked on developing the bomb.
A model of Little Boy located at Wendover Historic Airfield, in Utah, on the California border. The base, once neglected, is now being restored. This model, made by John Coster-Mullen, is considered one of the most accurate and is a centerpiece of the historical base, though the weapon was never here. Wendover was where the crews of the B-29s practiced dropping the bomb.
One of the most famous individual planes in history, this is the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the annex of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, located just outside of Washington, DC, in Chantilly, Virginia. A bomb is nothing without a plane to deliver it and few planes in the world could carry the weight of Little Boy. The Boeing B-29 Superfortressย (its development the most expensive of all the weapons programs in WWII, easily surpassing the cost of the entire Manhattan Project) is a central part of the story of Little Boy and Fat Man, though often underemphasized.
The same display as image #2. The plane that the bomb appears to “go with” has no relationship to it at all. It is a B-18 Bolo and the weight of Little Boy was more than twice the plane’s entire bomb load capacity.
In this model from Wendover Historic Airfield (where Tibbets and crews trained to drop the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs) you can see the bomb loaded via special loading pit. The B-29 would drive up over the bomb which would be lifted up into the plane. Even for these B-29s the weight of the bomb was so great that the plane would jerk sharply upwards upon release of the weapon.
At Wings Over the Rockies, an aerospace museum in Dallas. This Little Boy sits on its transport cart (uncommon to see). You can see the bomb again with its cart is image #4 of the model plane being loaded.
A Little Boy replica at the Bradbury Museum of the Los Alamos National Lab. The is in the main exhibit gallery but is not the star of the show by any measure, perhaps understandable given Los Alamos many other activities over the years and their desire to highlight their work that benefits non-military purposes.
A Fat Man displayed alongside Bockscar at the National Museum of the US Air Force, in Dayton, which gives scale to this very large and heavy bomb.
The view of Fat Man as you approach the entrance to the Bradbury Museum.
A Fat Man at the West Point Museum. The museum was quiet at the time I was there but while shooting this image from the balcony I was interrupted by a young man and woman who noisily entered the gallery below and, finding the bomb, became quite excited and shot several selfies with Fat Man in the background. Then they abruptly left. Note the Davey Crocket to the right of Fat Man, a sort of atomic bazooka from the 1960s. The explosive force of its small projectile was one-thousandth that of Fat Man.
The view of Fat Man from the interior of the Bradbury Museum at Los Alamos, part of the Los Alamos National Lab.
At some point during the loading of Fat Man into Bockscar, the nose of the bomb was stenciled with the letters “JANCFU” and the “FM” (with an outline of a bomb). The “FM,” unsurprisingly, stands for Fat Man. The longer stencil is an acronym for “Joint Army Navy Civilian Fuck Up,” a play of words on the more common SNAFU. Later, armed forces personnel would sign the bomb in various locations, though those signatures are not reproduced on any of the display units I visited. Located at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton.
Also at the Grissom Air Museum, this small wooden model display of Little Boy, Fat Man, and two crew members. Again, the model Fat Man sits upon its stabilizer.