Fat man – atomic bomb dropped on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the second of only two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare
Stop nagging, I just want to drink my saki (Nagasaki) said the fat man.
Three days after an atomic bomb called Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, a second one – code-named Fat Man – was dropped on another Japanese city, Nagasaki.
Fat Man – another product of the Manhattan Project – was an implosion-type bomb which used plutonium, a different technology to that used in Little Boy, which was a gun-type, uranium-235-based weapon.
Fat Man was 10ft 8ins (3.2m) long, had a diameter of 5ft (1.5m) and weighed 10,800lb (4899kg). It was detonated approximately 1,650 feet (500 metres) above Nagasaki.
The bomb instantly killed nearly 40,000 people. Tens of thousands more died later from radiation and other effects of the bomb.
Interesting fact: The design of Fat Man became the model for many atomic bombs that followed. An implosion bomb that used plutonium, Fat Man produced the explosive power of 22,000 tons of TNT compare with the 12,500 tons of Little Boy. However, because of Nagasaki's hilly terrain, the damage caused by Fat Man was less extensive than that caused by Little Boy in the relatively flat Hiroshima district.
