Fat Man
Plutonium is easier to Produce
The first of three images that I made of the all-white Fat Man at the Air Force Armaments Museum at Elgin Air Force Base, in Florida’s Panandle. One hundred and twenty Fat Man bombs were produced (as the Mark III bomb) in the years following World War II. This is an actual ballistic case of one of those bombs.
A bomb needs a delivery system, in this case a B-29 with its armor and almost all of its defensive guns removed. In this image we see a re-creation of the bombardier, now in control of the aircraft, working to aim the weapon at the target, despite the thick cloud cover. This B-29, named Bockscar, is the actual B-29 that dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki and is located at the National Museum of the US Air Force, in Dayton, Ohio.
Another view of Fat Man at the Air Force Armaments Museum.
A white-painted Fat Man on display in the outdoor “rocket garden” at the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico. This particular unit is, twice every year, trucked out to the Trinity site for public viewing.
A display case honoring Ralph D. Belanger, the assistant flight engineer on the The Great Artiste, a B-29 that accompanied Bockscar to Nagasaki. Belenger was actually part of the crew of Bockscar but he, along with his captain Frederick C. Bock and the entire crew, traded places with the The Great Artiste crew due to instrumentation issues. Thus, instead of the The Great Artiste dropping Fat Man, it was dropped by Bockscar. Belanger can be seen in the portrait in the center of the group image, with his crew.
The third view of the Fat Man (Mark III) at the Air Force Armaments Museum.
This model of Fat Man was made by John Coster-Mullen, a well-known amateur nuclear archeologist, with assistance of his son. (He and his son also built the Little Boy model at Wendover.) When I made this image this weapon was only viewable as part of a lengthy guided tour. While I was chatting with the gift shop clerk about my photo project a man standing near us offered to drive me out to the bomb’s location (in another building). Turns out he was the museum curator and he generously gave me ample time to photograph it.
On display at the entrance to the Atomic Museum in Las Vegas. The screen shows a B-29 on the runway at Tinian, from which the atomic bomb missions against Japan were launched. The full-sized statue of the showgirl seems at first to be part of the bomb display but is unrelated.
A small model of the Fat Man (or Mark III) sitting incongruously upright, upon its stabilizer. The plane tail in the image is a model of the B-58 Hustler, a supersonic bomber. As the Fat Man design was phased out before 1950 before the arrival of the B-58 Hustler, it seems unlikely that this plane carried this particular bomb. The small object that the figure is looking at appears to be one of the plane’s escape pods. Located at the Grissom Air Museum at Grissom AFB.
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.
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.
The view of Fat Man from the interior of the Bradbury Museum at Los Alamos, part of the Los Alamos National Lab.
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.
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.
This Fat Man bomb, at the Travis AFB Aviation Museum, is a “ballistic case” for a real bomb, probably one of the Mark III units–the Fat Man-style bombs that were made after WWII. It is on long-term loan from the Nuclear Museum in Albuquerque.
Weapon Specifications
Note that the relationship between explosive power and destruction is not linear—a weapon’s destructive effects grow far more slowly than its explosive power.
Explosive Power
21 kt
Hiroshima Equivalent Factor
1.4x
Dimensions
19 feet, 8 inches x 60 inches
Weight
10,800 lbs
Year(s)
1945
Purpose
Force Japanese Surrender
NukeMap
Simulated destruction of the Fat Man bomb as if detonated at St. Paul, Minneapolis. Click on the map to change parameters.
Videos
These curated videos provide additional context for this weapon — showing test footage, deployment scenes, technical explanations, interviews, or other historical material, allowing viewers to go deeper into the weapon’s design, use, and place in nuclear history.
Nuclear Engineer Break Down of Movie Fat Man and Little Boy, 29 minutes
The Atomic Age: A classic film about the Manhattan Project, this movie is also the only one I’ve seen to depict a criticality accidents (featuring the Demon Core), which I directly work to prevent. I also discuss the roles of Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and the Hanford Site, how uranium enrichment works, and how plutonium is made. Join me as I break down the nuclear physics involved in making the world’s first atomic bomb.
Hans Bethe – The implosion design of the plutonium atomic bomb, 2 and a half minutes
Web of Stories: German-born theoretical physicist Hans Bethe (1906-2005) was one of the first scientists to join the Manhattan Project, later strongly advocating nuclear disarmament. In 1967, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.
Further Reading
- Wikipedia, Atomic Archive, and the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
- Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, first published in 1987, is still the first book someone should read if they are interested in the development of Fat Man and Little Boy.
- Hard to find but worth reading are two first-hand accounts–one by Leslie Groves (the head of the Manhattan Project) who wrote And Now It Can be Told, and Kenneth Nichols (who worked under Groves to produce the uranium and plutonium for the bombs) who wrote The Road to Trinity. See also an interview with Nichols at OpenVault.
- I’ve not read Reed’s book, The History and Science of the Manhattan Project, but it is said to be a more technical but still accessible history. It is also expensive.
- It is always worthwhile to mention John Coster-Mullen’s book. He was a photographer turned truck driver turned model builder turned nuclear archeologist and made several interesting discoveries and built a full-scale models of Little Boy. He wrote a book of his findings, Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man, still sold (via Amazon) by his estate. I received a copy for Christmas.
- The full-scale model of Fat Man at the Historic Wendell Airfield, in Utah, was commissioned by the museum and built by NewRuleFX, a movie prop company based in Van Nuys, California.
- Just over four years from the detonation of Fat Man over Nagasaki, the Soviets denoted their first nuclear bomb, the RDS-1 (referred to as Joe-1 by the United States). The RDS-1 (seen in the uncaptioned photo on this page from the Nuclear Museum) looks strikingly similar to Fat Man.
- Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein has several articles worth noting here. First is his New Yorker article, “Nagasaki, the Last Bomb” (paywall) an excellent short account of the bombing. The second is a post from his blog, Restricted Data, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki at 70,” written for the anniversary in 2015. Note the picture of the bomb damage map of Nagasaki and the links in the picture’s caption to a view of the full map and the legend.
- Although his name seems largely unknown outside of scientific circles, George Kistiakowsky was a key player in the development of Fat Man, designing the high-explosive layer that would compress the plutonium. Here is an interview with Richard Rhodes at the Atomic Heritage Foundation and a panel discussion much later in his life.
- “Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki” summarizes the efforts to determine the number of casualties of the bombs–a much more complex question than it might at first seem. (Wellerstein–who I link to above and elsewhere–is a busy guy. I had read and picked out this article for including here before I realized he was the author. )
- Life Magazine has a worthwhile compilation of images, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Photos from the Ruins,” made in the weeks after Little Boy and Fat Man, coupled with excerpts of letters from their photographer Bernard Hoffman and from various articles published in Life after the war.
- This report, Japan’s Struggle to End the War, was published in 1946 by The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, describes efforts within Japan’s political system to formulate a surrender policy in the months leading up to the atomic bombings.
- Perhaps surprisingly, the Manhattan Project released a report to the public on as much as they felt they could share about the atomic bombs, how they worked and how they were made. The shared a lot. The report was published three days after the Nagasaki bombing and was part of a publicity campaign to shape public opinion about the weapons and to preserve some level of secrecy.
- The Nagasaki atomic bombing wasn’t the first time a Fat Man-style bomb had been dropped on Japan during the war, It was the 50th. Starting in July of 1945 and ending two weeks before the atomic strike, the Enola Gay, Bockscar, and other planes dropped high-explosive versions of Fat Man as rehearsals for the atomic bomb attack.