Germany had a cast iron kettle with some nuclear product imersed in a three foot pit of heavy water. That was it. Japan's ruling council wouldn't let the atomic researchers have some electronic equipment need for the war effort. It took General Grove to turn the US into a giant bomb making factory that produced two weapons. One a fission bomb and the other a fusion bomb. Plus the one used at Trinity.
It's all in the well researched book and a great read.
Was part of my home schooling reading list.
Both Fat Man and Little Boy were fission bombs
Little Boy was a uranium gun device. Fat Man and the Trinity device were both plutonium implosion devices.
The first true fusion device (not a deployable bomb) was detonated in 1951.
Excellent book. Highly recommended.
They were both fission bombs. One was a Uranium gun bomb ( A Uranium projectile fired down an actual cannon barrel into a Uranium receptacle.) The other was an Implosion plutonium device. A much more complex weapon. Trinity was a plutonium implosion bomb too. They never tested the Uranium gun bomb, they just knew it would work, but the implosion device was a lot tougher to guarantee because of it's complexity. That's why they did the Trinity test.
Agree. Rhodes is a good scholar. There’s a pretty new bio of Heisenberg out too, called “Heisenberg’s War” that confirms what you said.
I agree it is an excellent book.
The deep background in nuclear physics, back into the 19th century, gives immense insight into why things played out the way they did.
And of course, we had to spend massive amounts of money just to get two bombs. Neither Japan nor Germany had the money or resources to do that.