![]() Los Alamos's Thin Man and Fat Man code names were adopted by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF). The Little Boy uranium gun-type design came later and was named only to contrast with the Thin Man. Little Boy came last as a variation of Thin Man. The Fat Man was round and fat and was named after Sydney Greenstreet's character in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. He chose them based on their design shapes the Thin Man was a very long device, and the name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel The Thin Man and series of movies. ![]() These code names were created by Robert Serber, a former student of Oppenheimer's who worked on the Manhattan Project. The gun-type and implosion-type designs were codenamed " Thin Man" and "Fat Man", respectively. It was assumed that the uranium gun-type bomb could be easily adapted from it. Nonetheless, it was decided that the plutonium gun would receive the bulk of the research effort, since it was the project with the least uncertainty involved. Implosion-type bombs were determined to be significantly more efficient in terms of explosive yield per unit mass of fissile material in the bomb, because compressed fissile materials react more rapidly and therefore more completely. Oppenheimer reviewed his options in early 1943 and gave priority to the gun-type weapon, but he created the E-5 Group at the Los Alamos Laboratory under Seth Neddermeyer to investigate implosion as a hedge against the threat of pre-detonation. The committee concluded that any problems could be overcome simply by requiring higher purity. Groves Jr., who in turn assembled a special committee consisting of Lawrence, Compton, Oppenheimer, and McMillan to examine the issue. Conant informed Manhattan Project director Brigadier General Leslie R. Conant consulted Ernest Lawrence and Arthur Compton, who acknowledged that their scientists at Berkeley and Chicago, respectively, knew about the problem, but they could offer no ready solution. Wallace Akers, the director of the British " Tube Alloys" project, told James Bryant Conant on 14 November that James Chadwick had "concluded that plutonium might not be a practical fissionable material for weapons because of impurities". The feasibility of a plutonium bomb was questioned in 1942. Tolman suggested an implosion-type nuclear weapon, but the proposal attracted little interest. They chose a gun-type design in which two sub-critical masses would be brought together by firing a "bullet" into a "target". Robert Oppenheimer held conferences in Chicago in June 1942, prior to the Army taking over wartime atomic research, and in Berkeley, California, in July, at which various engineers and physicists discussed nuclear bomb design issues. Two more were detonated during the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946, and some 120 were produced between 19, when it was superseded by the Mark 4 nuclear bomb. The first of that type to be detonated was the Gadget in the Trinity nuclear test less than a month earlier on 16 July at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. Fat Man was an implosion-type nuclear weapon with a solid plutonium core. The name Fat Man refers to the early design of the bomb because it had a wide, round shape. It was built by scientists and engineers at Los Alamos Laboratory using plutonium from the Hanford Site, and was dropped from the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Bockscar piloted by Major Charles Sweeney. It was the second of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare, the first being Little Boy, and its detonation marked the third nuclear explosion in history. " Fat Man" (also known as Mark III) was the codename for the type of nuclear weapon the United States detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.
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