The A-bomb
Finished Little Boy bomb
We didn't create a succesful atom bomb until after the surrender of germany, we came out with two types of bombs in world war II however, Mk1 "Little boy" and Mk2 "Fat Man". Both models Mk 1 and Mk 2 were used in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. Little boy is uranium-235 based which is an sub-catagory of the uranium element. But urainum-235 occured 0.7% of the time in nature and was nearly identical to uranium-238. Fat Man is plutonium based; plutonium is a compond based of uranium.
The way LIttle Boy works is it takes a fissile uranium-235 "bullet" and fires it at a smaller target, on collision it creates a supercritical core. Then a neutron initiator, a device capable of producing a burst of neutrons, activates and fires neutrons into the colliding urainium and causes some atoms to reach critical mass and break. Fat Man how ever is an implosion method, in which exlosives shoot the fissile plutonium atoms toward a single point, containing a neutron initiator. This meant that the metal had to travel shorter ditances and consequently critical mass built faster. In both methods the split atoms would simultaneously release energy and release more propeled neutrons capable of spliting atoms than were put in.
See below for visual aid: |