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Why The Failure Of The Fat Man Bomb

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Even though the Little Boy bomb kill tens of thousands of people and devastated the entire city of Hiroshima, it failed to get Japan to surrender. However the U.S was ready to drop their second, more efficient and complex, atom bomb on Kokura. The Fat Man nuclear bomb was an implosion-type weapon consisting of a sphere of U-235 to act as a tamper and had a subcritical plutonium-239 core that was was surrounded by high explosives. To activate the chain reaction to trigger the bomb, the explosives surrounding the fissile material are ignited, which then creates a shock wave which causes the core to rapidly compress. The core density then increases, the mass becomes critical, then supercritical. The initiator is shortly released producing many

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