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November 1, 2007

Paul Tibbets, Jr., the pilot of the B-29 that flew over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, to drop "Little Boy," the first nuclear weapon used in war has died in Columbus, Ohio. He was born in Quincy, Illinois in 1915 and said he never lost a night's sleep over the bombing.

Crews made hundreds of practice runs over the Mojave Desert and the Salton Sea. The test bombs were full-sized mock-ups of the real thing -- the long and slender uranium "Little Boy" that would fall on Hiroshima and the bulbous plutonium "Fat Man" that would hit Nagasaki.

Most of the mock-ups were filled with concrete, but some contained everything but the nuclear components, including large quantities of conventional explosives in the triggering mechanisms.

On one Salton Sea run, a consulting engineer accidentally dropped one of the explosive Fat Man mock-ups too soon. Narrowly missing the town of Calipatria, the bomb buried itself in a hole 10 feet deep, but somehow failed to explode. Bulldozers were rushed to the scene to erase all evidence of the accident.

He said he wasn't proud of all the death and destruction and Hiroshima, but he was proud that he did his job well.

"I didn't start the war," he said. "I didn't do anything except what I was told to do; what I had sworn to do, years before, which is 'Fight for the defense of this country.' "

| permalink | November 1, 2007 at 05:47 PM

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