Naming
The names for all three atomic bomb design projects during WW II ("Fat Man", "Thin Man", and "Little Boy") were allegedly created by Robert Serber, a former student of Los Alamos director Robert Oppenheimer who worked on the project, according to Serber. According to his later memoirs, he chose them based on their design shapes; the "Thin Man" would be a very long device, and the name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel and series of movies by the same name; the "Fat Man" bomb would be round and fat and was named after Sidney Greenstreet's "Kasper Gutman" character in The Maltese Falcon. "Little Boy" would come last and be named only to contrast to the "Thin Man" bomb. The original "Thin Man" had been expected to be as long as 17 feet, but when it was discovered that U-235 would require a slower projectile speed than first measurements had indicated, it was realized that the gun-design could be shortened to 6 feet, and this design was named "Little Boy" in contrast. However, in his memoirs, Paul Tibbets, commander of the 509th Composite Group said the code names were part of an Air Force cover story. According to Tibbets, Project Silverplate, the Air Force program to modify the B-29 to carry atomic bombs, was given the cover story of modifying the B-29 into a passenger plane. One plane was allegedly for the use of Winston Churchill, 'the fat man', and the other for Franklin Roosevelt, 'the thin man.'
Read more about this topic: Little Boy
Famous quotes containing the word naming:
“See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul—half a drop! ah, my Christ!—
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!—
Yet will I call on him!—O, spare me, Lucifer!—
Where is it now? ‘T is gone; and see where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!—
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!”
—Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
“The night is itself sleep
And what goes on in it, the naming of the wind,
Our notes to each other, always repeated, always the same.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Husband,
who am I to reject the naming of foods
in a time of famine?”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)