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The third bomb
There was a third atomic bomb planned for Japan. I found it in a New Mexico museum
Story and Photos By Bill Newcott
August 6, 2020
“Let me show you the gadget,” says James Walther. My eyes take a moment to adjust as we step from the glaring, hot air of an Albuquerque, New Mexico summer into the dark, cool expanse of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History — its usually busy galleries eerily empty in this year COVID-19.
The museum’s director leads me past an array of unlit displays — the stretch sedan America’s first atomic scientists rode across the New Mexico desert…a hunk of uranium from Hitler’s nuclear program…equipment used to build the first nuclear bomb — until we stop in front of an enormous spherical device.
The thing bristles with dozens of cables, each linked to what appears to be a kind of spark plug. It’s shiny, complex, strangely beautiful — and with a little bit of bad luck it could have incinerated and irradiated hundreds of thousands of Japanese in 1945.
This is the Third Bomb.
After a jaw-dropping detonation in New Mexico — known to history as the Trinity Test — the world’s first atomic weapon was dropped by the United States on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. When the Japanese failed to immediately surrender, on August 9 a second atomic device was detonated over Nagasaki. Still, there was no definitive word that the Empire was about to give up as some persistent Japanese government war hawks were willing to gamble the U.S. didn’t have any more of these devastating weapons. We can still wait out the Allies, they said. But they were wrong.
About 80 miles north of where James Walther and I are standing now, in the small town of Los Alamos, scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project were assembling a third bomb, identical to the one dropped on Hiroshima. Known as “Fat Man” because of its wide girth, also referred to as “The Gadget” by its creators, the bomb was both astonishingly advanced and devilishly simple: It consisted of a small core of uranium surrounded by 5,000 pounds of high explosives. When those explosives were detonated at the same millisecond, they compressed that uranium core until it reached critical mass — at which point it exploded with the power of 12 kilotons of TNT.
The first Fat Man had leveled a square mile of Hiroshima. This one would be just as devastating. Fat Man II’s aluminum shell had already been cast by the time the Nagasaki bomb was dropped. All that was needed was (READ MORE)
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For Bill's account of his visit to Trinity, the site of the first atomic bomb test, see his story at NationalGeographic.com
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