Everybody knows “Fat Man,” right? The atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki has been described in some detail in the last few decades. It, just like the “Trinity” “gadget,” was an implosion design bomb that used explosives lenses to compress its plutonium core.
A novel solution to the threat of "dirty bombs"? A "Fat Man" display casing being driven through a Los Alamos car wash. Vouched as legitimate (not Photoshopped) to me over e-mail by a scientist at Los Alamos who claims to have spoken to the truck's driver. The car wash appears to me (via Google Street View) to be the one attached to a "Shamrock" gas station at 1239 Trinity Drive.
Since the implosion concept was first declassified in 1951 as part of the Rosenberg trial,1 there has been a steady stream of information about the “Fat Man” and “Trinity” bomb designs. The most detailed ones on offer today come from Carey Sublette and John Coster-Mullen, two nuclear weapons design speculators who’ve pinned down a relentlessly detailed, fine-grained vision of what those two nearly-identical weapons were supposed to be:
Carey Sublette and John Coster-Mullen's version of the Gadget/Fat Man bombs.
And yet, after all this time, is there still more to know? More details? How wonkish can you get? Here’s my play for bomb-secret-speculator immortality: there was a very specific, small difference between the cores of the Trinity “gadget” and the “Fat Man” devices. (And the crowd goes, oooo.)
- On the declassification of implosion, see Roger M. Anders, “The Rosenberg case revisited: The Greenglass testimony and the protection of atomic secrets,” American Historical Review 83, no. 2 (April 1978), 388-400. [↩]
