The Enola Gay: The Creation Of The Atomic Bomb

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The Enola Gay is a B-29 bomber aircraft that was used to end World War II. American technological advancements surged ahead in the 1940s and the war with Japan resulted in the production of the 9,700 pound atomic bomb named “Little Boy”. This bomb was dropped onto the city Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 by Enola Gay’s pilot Colonel Paul W. Tibbets. Four years earlier Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the main American naval port, had been bombed by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. This killed nearly 3,000 Americans and injured over a thousand more; hundreds of planes and eighteen ships were also either damaged or destroyed. The United States joined World War II the day after on December 8. For years America and Japan were losing lives on each side, but Japan refused to surrender. …show more content…
Roosevelt in 1939, the year WWII began, that there was plenty of evidence in Germany to suggest that an extremely powerful and devastating atomic bomb could be created. The power in an atomic bomb comes from the nuclear fission of uranium, breaking the atoms for a release of energy, amidst the explosion. At 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945, Little Boy was dropped from Enola Gay onto Hiroshima. The mechanism of the bomb was designed so that it detonated about 600 meters above the city. The target was a bridge that crossed the Ota River and was in a “T” shape, Aioi Bridge. Within a tenth of a second of exploding, the huge fireball was already 30 meters in diameter. At one second the explosion was at its maximum size of 370 meters in diameter and had an initial temperature of over 10,000,000 ºC (18,000,000

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