New Mexico ushered in the Nuclear Age by detonating the world's first Atomic Bomb at 5:30AM atop a 100-foot steel tower in the desert near Alamogordo, N.M. It exploded with a force of 20,000 tons of TNT. Three weeks later, on the morning of August 6,1945, the B-29 bomber "Enola Gay" dropped the one and only "Gun-Type" Uranium bomb "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan, with devastating results in damage and loss of life. Even though only a fraction of the U235 fissioned, it still yielded a 15,000 ton blast. Three days later, we followed up with a Plutonium-type device over Nagasaki, which was a carbon-copy of the New Mexico bomb. Within days, Japan sue for peace and WW2 was over, eliminating the need for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese homeland, with predicted losses of up to a million on both sides. (This is the exact bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Only one was built, and was never tested before use.) Hal
I think that to be historically correct you need to make your post say the the United States ushered in the nuclear age by dropping this bomb in New Mexico
Your'e right, Al...the United States, with the help of eminent European scientists working in the Manhattan Project, ushered in the Nuclear Age. The device was not "dropped" from the 100 foot tower height so as not to waste its power by just forming a crater...which it did...1200 feet in diameter. "Little Boy", the Hiroshima bomb, was detonated 1800 feet above the city, which allowed its energy to be much more widespread. Hal
...at 8:15AM Japan time, a lone American B-29 bomber dropped a single nuclear bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, destroying it with a great loss of life. Three days later, on August 9, another B-29 dropped a different type of nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, destroying that city also. These were the only 2 events in history where Nuclear bombs were used against an enemy. Five days later, Japan surrendered, ending WW2. Hal