S[eaman]: There's one ready to be shipped - waiting on order right now.
H: If the order is given now, when can it be ready?
S: Thursday would be its readiness; the 19th it would be dropped.
S: … Then there will be another one the first part of September. Then there are three definite. There is a possibility of a fourth one in September, either the middle or the latter part.
H: Now, how many in October?
S: Probably three in October.
H: That’s three definite, possibly four by the end of September; possibly three more by the end of October; making a total possibility of seven. That is the information I want.
S: So you can figure on three a month with a possibility of a fourth one. If you get the fourth one, you won’t get it next month. That is up to November.
H: The last one, which is a possibility for the end of October, could you count on that for use before the end of October?
S: You have a possibility of seven, with a good chance of using them prior to the 31st of October.
H: They come out approximately at the rate of three a month.
Hmmmmm, I had always thought there were only two A-bombs ready to go. I guess a third one was on the way.
I had always been told that they only had enough fissile material for 3 devices. The test bomb at Los alamos and the 2 we dropped on the enemy.
Supposedly would have taken months for another bomb to be ready
There were three Model 1561 “Fat Man” bomb units assembled and held in reserve on Tinian the week after the Nagasaki mission.
They were labeled F101, F102 and F103.
In building the first large reactor they needed something like 16 tons of copper. But none available. They went to the treasury department and got 16.5 tons of silver to use instead! (Or some-such numbers).
Some book I read in the past convinced me that it was a huge military loss in Manchuria that led to the Jap surrender more so than the bombs...or a combination, certainly.
Maybe we captured some from the Germans.
The “Trinity” device wasn’t a weapon - it was a test device designed to demonstrate the plutonium/implosion fission method for bringing the core to critical mass and creating the explosion. The test was because while the yield was theorized to be larger and created more efficiently than the uranium/gun-style fission method (as used in Little Boy), it was also much more complex due to the need for all the compression “lenses” to trigger at the right moments.
They didn’t want to risk dropping an implosion device on Japan and have it fail.
“Fat Man”, dropped on Nagasaki, was the first real plutonium/implosion bomb. I’m not sure what the sequence of production was (it was laid out in several books I read) between the two types, but the 3rd bombing was going to be Tokyo, with Tibbets piloting Enola Gay again. The Nagasaki mission didn’t go well at all, between missed rendezvous, Nagasaki being the secondary target, the apparent decision by the strike aircraft crew to violate orders and drop the bomb using radar targeting (ultimately not needed because there was a last minute opening in the cloud cover) and even then missing the AP by a HUGE amount ... and topped off by Bocks Car pretty much running out of gas and just about needing to be dead-sticked into Okinawa, Tibbets decided that HE needed to lead the 3rd strike.
A-Bomb no 4=London
A-Bomb no 5=Paris
A-Bomb no 6=Berlin
A-Bomb no 7=Moscow
A-Bomb no 8=What’s left of Japan
Gee, I wonder if this conversation was for the purpose of making the Nips think we were prepared to go Hiroshima over the whole country right away, when in fact the fourth A-bomb was actually months away?
Naahhhhhhh!