Page 6 - Demo
P. 6
Nuclear Weapons of the Atomic Age900 support buildings and radiological laboratories. By 1971, eight of the reactors had been shut down, and the last was switched off in 1987. A great deal of radiological contamination was produced at Hanford. As a designated Superfund Site, it has the distinction of being the world's largest environmental cleanup project. Today, much of its land is managed by the National Park Service.The First Atomic BombsThe war-time work at Los Alamos eventually produced several atomic bombs. The first, code named Trinity (often simply referred to as the Gadget), was detonated on July 16, 1945 in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The location was selected for its remoteness.There was considerable disagreement among the scientists about what the bomb%u2019s yield would be%u2014and some thought it would be a dud. In a betting pool, Robert Oppenheimer chose a yield equivalent to 0.3 kilotons of TNT, explosives expert George Kistiakowsky 1.4 kilotons, and Theoretical Division Director Hans Bethe 8 kilotons. Isidor Rabi arrived at the site late, and took the last bet available, of 18 kilotons of TNT. Enrico Fermi offered to take wagers on whether the atmosphere would ignite, and possibly incinerate the entire planet. Rabi won the pool, and the atmosphere did not catch fire.The detonation was initially planned for 4 in the morning but was postponed because of rain and lightning until about 5:30, when the massive explosion stunned the onlookers, with a yield of about 21 kilotons. There was a great deal of excitement among those present that it had worked. When everyone began regaining their composure, Kenneth Bainbridge, who had been in charge of planning the test, told Oppenheimer, \ we are all sons of bitches.\The next two weapons, nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man, were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki about three weeks after Trinity. While Fat Man was very similar to Trinity, the Little Boy bomb was of a different (untested) design. It yielded a blast of about 15 kilotons.At each Japanese city, almost everything directly under the explosions was completely destroyed, except for a few heavily reinforced concrete buildings. There was an initial blinding light followed by a massive 4,000%u00b0 F fireball, which caused anything flammable near ground zero to burst into flame. Roughly 200,000 Japanese were killed by the initial effects of the two blasts, and many more died or suffered from various The Gadget was detonated atop a 100-foot tower. As it was being winched up, a part of it became unhinged. For just such a situation, a truckload of mattresses had been positioned under the device. Fortunately the bomb was stabilized before it could fall.