Little Boy

Little Boy was the type of bomb dropped on Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. This reworking of the unsuccessful Thin Man design, which originally used plutonium-239, operated through the nuclear fission of uranium-235. It was created in the Los Alamos Lab of the Manhattan Project and was manufactured in three different plants to prevent anyone from having the entirety of the designs. The name Little Boy was an allusion to the name of Thin Man, a reference to The Thin Man, the detective novel by Dashiell Hammet. Little Boy weighed 9,000 pounds and was only 28 inches in diameter, yet exploded with the force of approximately 15 kilotons of TNT when it was dropped untested on the city of Hiroshima. This was the second man-made nuclear explosion following the Trinity nuclear test and the start of the end of WWII.