13. Little Boy and Fat Man
Don’t take the name literally. It is not about a kid walking around with his fat uncle causing terror in the neighborhood. But those are the nicknames of the two bombs destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki back in 1945.
Little Boy and Fat Man are the first and only nuclear weapons used in a combat (let’s hope it stays that way). It brought bombing into a new level. And the damage was horrifying. That day, the world witnessed what atomic bombing is all about. And that day, nearly half a million people were presumably killed.
Little Boy was dropped first on Hiroshima on 6th of August from Boeing B-29, making it the first ever atomic bomb used in warfare. Filled with 64 kilograms of Uranium-235, it has blast yield of 15 kilotons TNT.
Fat Man, in the other hand, was bigger in size and weight compared to the little boy. However, with only a tenth of Little Boy’s filling, it can produce bigger blast yield: 21 kilotons. Well, Fat Man’s filling is plutonium, that’s why. Both of them are no longer produced but they certainly will never be forgotten.
