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Topic starter
06/08/2020 2:53 am
75 years ago today.
"Little Boy", the U-235 atomic bomb, was dropped and detonated above the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Brumm made a replica of it in 1:43 scale.
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In 2002 remaining members of the 509th Composite Group had a reunion in Oak Ridge, TN, where the refined U-235 isotope was made. The Enola Gay navigator, Dutch Van Kirk, was signing color pics that had been pre-signed by pilot Paul Tibbets and Bock's Car pilot Charles Sweeney. I snagged one.
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And when the American Museum of Science and Energy sold off a lot of their stuff before moving to a smaller location, I grabbed this Enola Gay posterboard pic.
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Oak Ridge was the "Secret City" that researched and manufactured the uranium and plutonium which brought the war in the Pacific to a close. No one got in through the gates who didn't belong, under threat of machine gun fire through sallyports.
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The irony of the above photo is that my old Miata was built in Hiroshima.
06/08/2020 3:14 am
That is ironic.
06/08/2020 3:15 am
Good post, Harvey. Thanks.
06/08/2020 4:04 am
++1
06/08/2020 4:25 am
Best story and history lesson ever posted on forum 43.
06/08/2020 5:23 am
Incredible history lesson, Harvey.
The 1/43 scale model gives us a sense of the size of the bomb that caused such devastation.
David Knight
Richmond, Virginia. USA
06/08/2020 5:34 am
REAL DEAL (pic/link)
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cut and paste
Topic starter
06/08/2020 5:56 am
Some more history and pictures.
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General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon, and was in charge of the Manhattan Project.
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Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb (1946 picture)
There are three separate facilities that made up the Oak Ridge complex.
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X-10, known now as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was home to research labs and the Graphite Reactor (near center of picture). I worked here from 2009 to 2019, but of course it looks a lot different now!
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K-25, where centrifuge separation of the U-235 (enriched uranium) and U-238 (depleted uranium) took place. In 1945 this was the largest structure in the world - if you walked from the top of one side of the "U", down, across, and up to the other side, you walked a mile. Today it is completely gone and environmentally cleaned up. We may get an airport here.
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Y-12 is where calutrons were used to painstakingly enrich uranium in a magnetic process, until the K-25 site was operational. Today Y-12 is part of the National Nuclear Security Administration, under DOE. I've worked there too.
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Various vintage pictures were taken by the late Ed Westcott. Groves wanted full documentation of the Manhattan Project, and Ed was one of the first people hired with authority to go anywhere with his camera. Most if not all of his pictures have been declassified by now. I met him once at a book signing. The city thought so much of him a shopping center was named for him.
Topic starter
06/08/2020 5:57 am
Probably why Brumm included a serviceman, to depict the scale of the weapon.
06/08/2020 8:28 am
American inventiveness created the A bomb. Now will American inventiveness create a "weapon" to defeat Covid 19? Two hundred thousand A bomb deaths, 700,000 covid deaths and counting.
John F. Quilter
Eugene, Oregon USA
06/08/2020 8:36 am
We could always bomb the hell out of China... BUT then what would we do for our little cars?
07/08/2020 5:54 am
Topic starter
07/08/2020 6:37 am
The old gas cetrifuge machines were around 50 ft. tall, so an equivalent 4-5 stories sounds right.
I was only in this building once before it was torn down, so I don't know that much about the roof equipment. I do know the building was steam heated, so possibly condensing equipment? The building went through a period of shutdown in the 1980s and I know there was a massive effort to replace all the sprinkler risers from wet pipe operation to dry pipe - over 100 sprinkler risers.
BTW I live, as the crow flies, about 5 miles from this site.
07/08/2020 4:03 pm
"the four-story K-25 gaseous diffusion plant was the world's largest building" -wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-25