The Manhattan Project.

[MKSheppard]

So I am reading through the General Correspondence of the Manhattan Engineer District at the National Archives II; and there's just one annoyance.

I'm finding red tabbed "we think this is fun and important so we're reclassifying it - sucks to be you" papers dated from 2005 throughout the files. There are some yellow tabbed reclassification notices from 1994; but they're outnumbered by the 2005 stuff.

It's so annoying. We're 65 years into the future; and this was a very experimental weapons deployment, and I'm finding stuff like "transhipment lists" in the Tinian files classified. What possible use or breach of national security would it be if I knew the box numbers of the shipment that the active sphere arrived on Tinian in???

Anyway.

The Indianapolis was not the only choice for carrying Little Boy to Tinian:



If you ever wondered what exactly she carried, wonder no more:



The Next Bomb?



Tokyo was possibly placed back on the list of targets:



For those of you who wonder what happened to all the extra FM and LB cases we shipped to Tinian after the war:



Poor high-energy physics experiments...what did the world ever hold against you?

[MKSheppard]

Oh; and if you ever wondered why I think Sandy Berger should have gone away for 25 years for destroying historical documents?



This is from a draft titled "Our Army of the Future - As Influenced by Atomic Weapons" -- 26~ December 1945.

I also found a second copy of the draft; and the part about "we and our dependable allies must have an exclusive supremacy" is different -- in that there's no "dependable" pencilled in.

[MKSheppard]

So it appears that the plan if the Japs did not fold was to assemble and drop Fat Man Units F101, F102, and F103 as test devices; with plaster blocks and/or low-quality HE castings to prove out the assembly procedures and the latest batches of electronic components.

Fat Man Unit F32 apparently was slated to receive an active sphere (read, fissile material).

To give you a scope of how big the non-fissile material program was; apparently there was a request for Fat Man Units F100 through F200 (!) to be assigned to N.F. Ramsley and his Project A at Tinian for test and assembly purposes.

In case you're wondering where the designation F31 etc came from....it was their designation for shipping purposes. It was decided on Tinian to continue to refer to the bomb units by their shipping numbers; which were Lx if it was Little Boy, or Fx if it was Fat Man.

L11 was Little Boy and F31 was Fat Man.

EDIT: Some more fun facts:

APCOM 5416
8 August 1945

(snip snip)

The paper [we are dropping over Japan] contains detailed accounts of our weapon and its use. In interview with 3 Japanese officers captured at Okinawa who did our translation, Moynahan was told that it would take at least one more bomb before the Empire would realize the power of the weapon.

[Thanas]

Oh; and if you ever wondered why I think Sandy Berger should have gone away for 25 years for destroying historical documents?

Eh? Is that his handwriting?




And great stuff as always, Shep. Always fascinating to see these.

[MKSheppard]

Eh? Is that his handwriting?

No no no.

Sandy Berger was Clinton's NSA from '97 to 2001; and in 2004; he was caught stuffing classified documents down his pants at the National Archives.

Because he was working in a section which had not yet been inventoried....nobody knows if he actually stole and destroyed any original documents relating to the Clinton Administrations' response to the millennium plot of 2000.

See, the documents that he was looking at and stuffed down his pants were multiple copies of the same report -- why would you do that when a single copy would suffice?

The answer is that not all copies are made the same; some may have specific handwritten notations made by the principal at the time -- like for example, the two drafts of that "Army of the Future" document I found. One was plain smarmy (we want the bomb for ourselves and our allies); the other was even MORE smarmier (for ourselves and our DEPENDABLE allies).

[Thanas]

Eh? Is that his handwriting?

No no no.

Sandy Berger was Clinton's NSA from '97 to 2001; and in 2004; he was caught stuffing classified documents down his pants at the National Archives.

Because he was working in a section which had not yet been inventoried....nobody knows if he actually stole and destroyed any original documents relating to the Clinton Administrations' response to terrorism.

Ah, ok. I hate people that destroy archives, especially because it gives rise to theories like the last one, which are impossible to prove or disprove.

[erik_t]

Very interesting to see positive control exercised so early to such a degree. Note that no complete weapon was ever in transit until Enola Gay lifted off on 6 Aug. Very nearly, not even a complete set of parts to a single weapon was in transit at the same time (only 26-28 July, before Indy arrived but after the three C-54s departed).

[MKSheppard]

Very interesting to see positive control exercised so early to such a degree. Note that no complete weapon was ever in transit until Enola Gay lifted off on 6 Aug. Very nearly, not even a complete set of parts to a single weapon was in transit at the same time (only 26-28 July, before Indy arrived but after the three C-54s departed).

Actually, I think it was more to do with the fact that fissile back then was enormously expensive.

For one; they actually issued orders that each shipment would fly with it's own trio of G-1 Parachutes, each having a 300-pound capacity.

So if a serious problem developed with the C-54; the fissile would be saved; also if one C-54 went down, you only lost 1/3 of the material, not 100%.

Anyway. Think I should try FOIAing this? It's been 22 years since this declassification review.

[erik_t]

Very interesting to see positive control exercised so early to such a degree. Note that no complete weapon was ever in transit until Enola Gay lifted off on 6 Aug. Very nearly, not even a complete set of parts to a single weapon was in transit at the same time (only 26-28 July, before Indy arrived but after the three C-54s departed).

Actually, I think it was more to do with the fact that fissile back then was enormously expensive.

For one; they actually issued orders that each shipment would fly with it's own trio of G-1 Parachutes, each having a 300-pound capacity.

So if a serious problem developed with the C-54; the fissile would be saved; also if one C-54 went down, you only lost 1/3 of the material, not 100%.

No, it's not just that. Note that Indianapolis carried the gun projectile material while the C-54s carried the target. Note further that while two C-54s carried the Fat Man core, other C-54s carried the (quite hard to duplicate) HE shell. Were saving of fissile material the only consideration, the HE shells wouldn't need separate transport, and arguably Indianapolis wouldn't have been tasked with special materials transport either (the chances of permanently losing U/Pu in a sinking being, I would think, higher than losing it in a parachute-equipped aircraft).

[MKSheppard]

A little something for all the USAF Special Weaponeers who assembled, loaded and armed the devices we so love:

How you assemble and load an atomic bomb

This is a webpage I put up with about 4 MB of photos. So 56K die. You'll notice that Little boy and Fat man switch back and forth in the photos; but this is because that's what the collection I found at NARA was like.

But you'll be able to get an idea of how they loaded them from this.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Very nice set of pictures, Shep. Nice work.

[ryacko]

APCOM 5416
8 August 1945

(snip snip)

The paper [we are dropping over Japan] contains detailed accounts of our weapon and its use. In interview with 3 Japanese officers captured at Okinawa who did our translation, Moynahan was told that it would take at least one more bomb before the Empire would realize the power of the weapon.

Interesting. Somewhat related though: http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmurp ... 00812.aspx

[ChaserGrey]

Wow. Just stumbled on this (I here am new, yes?) and it's a great piece of material. Have you considered writing it up in article/book form?

[PeZook]

You know...that's not that bad of an idea. Somebody suggested once that Shep really should be paid for all that research

[Sarevok]

The various pieces of original research on primary sources Shep has posted is very fascinating. It would indeed be a good thing if he compiled them in a published book someday. The internet is a fickle thing and it would a regrettable loss if any of Sheps work was lost to digital oblivion.

[Marcus Aurelius]

This is a webpage I put up with about 4 MB of photos. So 56K die. You'll notice that Little boy and Fat man switch back and forth in the photos; but this is because that's what the collection I found at NARA was like.

They switch so much that you made a little error in the captions (emphasis added):

Project A (Alberta) member CDR A. Francis Birch (left) numbers Little Boy Unit L-11 while Norman Ramsey (right) watches. This is the actual unit which was dropped on Nagasaki.

[Kyler]

MKSheppard

Thanks for post of the documents and the link for the pictures. Definitely some interesting material that I had never read or seen.


Have you ever research information about Hydrogen Bomb program? I recently started reading Richard Rhodes "Dark Sun" again. It is amazing in the initial stages of the H-bomb's development there was so much bickering and fighting between scientists, especially from Teller.