Little Boy and Fat Man

by Stephen Fleischman

“Little Boy” and “Fat Man” were the names given to the first two nuclear weapons ever dropped on civilian populations. Japan was the target. It happened toward the end of World War II.

Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima from a B-29 bomber, piloted by US Army Air Force Col. Paul W. Tibbets, who named his plane “Enola Gay” in honor of his mother, the night before the atomic attack.

Fat Man, was a more complicated and powerful plutonium weapon with a force equal to 20 kilotons of TNT devastating more that two square miles of Nagasaki and caused approximately 45,000 immediate deaths..

The wallop that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th, 1945, ended the war that was already about to end and left a metallic taste in everybody’s mouth. These unnecessary and militarily useless acts, falsely postulating it would end the war sooner, has caused the United States a legacy of shame.

History has a way of reincarnating itself as well as repeating itself.

Do we have, today, a reincarnation of Little Boy, a small nation in the Middle East, alleged to have an arsenal of 200 or more nuclear weapons, threatening and attacking its neighbors?