The Enola Gay. The first, of only two, aircraft to drop an atomic weapon in anger. This is the actual plane that dropped the atomic bomb, code named "Little Boy", on Hiroshima, Japan August 6, 1945. The pilot's name was Col Paul Tibbets.
To give you an idea of the incredible power of not just the bomb but of the power that binds the components of an atom together consider this: The business end of the bomb used only a little over 64 kilograms (about 141 lbs) of uranium to do it's thing. Now, there are really only two types of stuff in the universe: mass or energy. That's really it, and as you may have heard E=MC2
E=MC2--what does that mean? It means that the amount of energy in something (E) is equal to it's mass (M) times the speed of light squared (C2). Basically what it means is there is a tremendous amount of energy in all matter...IF (big if) you can rip the atomic shell apart to release it. For almost all elements this is very, very hard to do (by hard I mean impossible really); but some elements lend themselves to this process more easily than others, like uranium.
Little Boy detonated at 1,980 ft above Hiroshima that morning as inside the bomb casing a 25.6 kg slug of uranium was fired down a short barrel into a 38.5 kg target of uranium. The collision between the two 'halves' of uranium instantaneously reached critical mass--converting a mere 600 grams of uranium into pure energy. The act of ripping loose those 600 grams (about 21 oz by weight) worth of protons, electrons and neutrons is what caused the massive heat, radiation and explosion.
Think about that. The destruction of an entire city was caused by nothing more than a pound or so of nuclei that went out for ice cream and never came back.
Three days later Fat Man, a second atomic device, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Six days after that, on August 15th, 1945 Japan surrendered ending World War II.
Those 600 grams of split particles, and their cousins at Nagasaki, saved the lives of an estimated 1 million US soldiers.
