Thursday, August 6, 2009

Happy "Little Boy Day"


First, Ketosis is NOT a pedophile...

today it he anniversary of the Famous Flight of the Enola Gay.

On 5 August 1945, during preparation for the first atomic mission, pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets who assumed command of the aircraft, renamed the B-29 after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets (1893–1983), who had been named for the heroine of a novel. According to Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts,[4] regularly assigned aircraft commander Robert Lewis was unhappy to be displaced by Tibbets for this important mission, and became furious when he arrived at the aircraft on the morning of 6 August to see it painted with the now-famous nose art. Tibbets himself, interviewed on Tinian later that day by war correspondents, confessed that he was a bit embarrassed of having attached his mother's name to such a fateful mission.

The release at 08:15 (Hiroshima time) went as planned, and the gravity bomb known as "Little Boy", a gun-type fission weapon with 60 kilograms (130 lb) of uranium-235, took 57 seconds to fall from the aircraft to the predetermined detonation height about 600 metres (2,000 ft) above the city. Due to crosswind, it missed the aiming point, the Aioi Bridge, by almost 800 feet (240 m) and detonated directly over Shima Surgical Clinic.[22] It created a blast equivalent to about 13 kilotons of TNT. (The U-235 weapon was considered very inefficient, with only 1.38% of its material fissioning.)[23] The radius of total destruction was about one mile (1.6 km), with resulting fires across 4.4 square miles (11 km2).[24] Americans estimated that 4.7 square miles (12 km2) of the city were destroyed. Japanese officials determined that 69% of Hiroshima's buildings were destroyed and another 6–7% damaged.[5]

70,000–80,000 people, or some 30%[25] of the population of Hiroshima were killed immediately, and another 70,000 injured.[26] Over 90% of the doctors and 93% of the nurses in Hiroshima were killed or injured; most had been in the downtown area which had been greatly damaged.[27]

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