| The first atomic bomb used in warfare was dropped by the United States on August 6, 1945. Called Little Boy, it produced an explosion that devastated the city of Hiroshima in Japan and killed tens of thousands of people in less than one minute. In this bomb, a mass of uranium about the size of a baseball produced an explosion as powerful as 15 kilotons of TNT. Little Boy, which is schematized here, was a gun-type fission bomb. A small wedge of uranium was fired at a larger target piece of uranium and, upon impact, the two pieces fused together briefly, forming what is called a supercritical mass (a mass slightly greater than that necessary to sustain a chain reaction). |
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