Little Boy: The Untested Bomb That Changed War

Logosofia no Dia a Dia · Oct 9, 2026 · 32m

Little Boy was the least efficient nuclear weapon ever built, throwing away 98.5% of its fuel — and it was the one Los Alamos trusted without a full-scale test. This episode traces the strange engineering of the gun-type bomb, from the death of the plutonium Thin Man design to the 72-inch cannon barrel that became the world's first deployed atomic weapon. Then it follows the morning of August 6, 1945, from Tinian's runway to the detonation 1,968 feet above Hiroshima. And it confronts the harder question: what does it mean that a 15-kiloton weapon — 3,300 times smaller than Tsar Bomba — killed…