The harrowing story of the Nagasaki bombing mission
For nearly eight hours, the crew sped toward mainland Japan, each man hunkered in a cramped workspace with no access to external radio communication. Outside, monsoon winds, rain, and lightning lashed at them. Inside, they experienced moments of terror, such as when the bomb began to arm itself—a red light blinking with increasing rapidity—midway to their destination. One of them, bearing the newly minted title “weaponeer,” grabbed the Bomb’s blueprints and raced to figure out what was wrong.
The story of what transpired inside the plane carrying Fat Man to Nagasaki, Japan, has not really been told in detail to this extent, although some excellent overall renditions have been written of the atomic bomb program as a whole. Bits and pieces of the story have appeared in the diaries of the men who flew the mission—although sometimes the diaries appeared years after the event, or were based on hurriedly scribbled, hand-written notes jotted down during the flight.
It is a story of astonishing screw-ups that easily could have plunged the plane, the men, and the bomb into the Pacific Ocean. That the mission succeeded is genuinely miraculous. New, in-depth particulars of what went wrong, recounted here in a single narrative for what may be the first time, matter a great deal."
http://thebulletin.org/harrowing-story-nagasaki-bombing-mission8592
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