Little Boy and Fat Man (Green Planet Monitor ep22)

Seventy-eight years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb, code named ‘Little Boy’, on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima. Three days later, they dropped a second bomb, a plutonium-implosion device — Fat Man — on Nagasaki. When the dust settled, between 130 and 225,000 people were dead or dying.

To this day, casualty numbers vary widely. One thing is clear: almost all were civilians. Thousands more would sicken and die in the years to come. America’s public rationale for its nuclear bombing of Japan: avoiding the huge casualties that would supposedly have resulted from putting boots on Japanese soil. Other, more cynical reasons would emerge in time.

This is a story about America’s development of Little Boy and Fat Man, featuring interviews with German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, head of the theoretical physics division of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where America’s first nuclear ‘device’, Trinity, was developed, and the winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. Host David Kattenburg interviewed Bethe in his office at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.

You’ll also hear from Martin Johns, late Professor Emeritus of physics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, and researcher at Canada’s Chalk River nuclear facility, about the history of Canada’s involvement in the development of America’s nuclear bombs.

Find more Green Planet Monitor, and support the show, at https://www.greenplanetmonitor.net/