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The web of secrets and lies finally comes unraveled in the penultimate episode of “Manhattan” after Reed Akley comes to terms with the realization that a Thin Man bomb would pre-detonate. Akley, who learned about the secret partnership between Frank Winter and Charlie Isaacs in the previous episode, tries to salvage the Thin Man program […]

August 6th and August 9th will be the 70th anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In advance of the anniversaries, we are featuring photographs that show the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs being prepared, along with the planes, for the missions. The photos can be viewed on our website and on Facebook (Little Boy and Fat […]

Technical description, photographs, and video of atomic bombs Little Boy and Fat Man dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The New York Times (NYT) published an article this month on the public’s recent interest in photographs of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs. As the NYT’s William Broad notes, some of the photographs have been online for years but only recently went “viral,” attracting the interest of tens of thousands of people. The websiteAlternateWars published […]

On a recent trip to the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, Bill Lightfoot came across something surprising. On display was one of the firesets, or electronic fuses, that his father, William F. Lightfoot, worked on for the Raytheon Company during the Manhattan Project. Bill Lightfoot remarks, “I had been told by a Raytheon rep […]

This August marks the 72nd anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The 509th Composite Group of the Army Air Forces flew from Tinian Island in the Pacific to deliver the bombs, nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man. Little Boy, a uranium gun-type bomb, exploded with approximately 15 kilotons of force over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Fat Man, […]

Manhattan Project scientists designed the world’s first atomic bombs: a uranium gun-type bomb, “Little Boy” and a plutonium implosion bomb, “Fat Man.” The US dropped the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Between 90,000 and 166,000 people are believed to have died from the bomb in the four-month period following the explosion. The Fat Man bomb, dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killed about 80,000 Japanese by the end of 1945. Historians continue to debate the role of the atomic bombs in ending World War II.

George Cowan: What you’ve learned from the Russians, for example? Richard Rhodes: The main thing I have learned is that their first bomb was a carbon copy of Fat Man. Cowan Cowan: Well of course. I knew that in 1949, about the middle of September of ’49 because we analyzed the debris from that and […]

Eugene DiSabatino (1922-2012) was a member of the Special Engineer Detachment at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He also deployed to Tinian to help prepare the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb. DiSabatino was born in Wilmington, Delaware on May 10, 1922. In the spring of 1943, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Intending to become […]

Theodore “Ted” Hall (1925-1999) was an American physicist and an atomic spy who passed along detailed information about the implosion-type “Fat Man” bomb and several processes for purifying plutonium to the Soviet Union. Hall was raised in a wealthy Jewish family in New York City. As a young teenager, Hall demonstrated considerable aptitude in mathematics […]