In 2004 the Department of Energy repaired and repainted the artifact at its Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.Ĭlick here to return to the World War II Gallery. Today, the re-assembled Boeing B-29 Superfortress remains a powerful symbol of the. When constructed in 1945, the 'Little Boy' on display was an operational weapon, but it has been completely demilitarized for display purposes. bomber Enola Gay dropped the first ever Atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The B-29 (also called Superfortress) was a four-engine heavy bomber that was built by Boeing. The aircraft was named after the mother of pilot Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr.
Weighing about 9,000 pounds, it produced an explosive force equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. Enola Gay, the B-29bomber that was used by the United States on August 6, 1945, to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, the first time the explosive device had been used on an enemy target. The result of the Manhattan Project, begun in June 1942, 'Little Boy' was a gun-type weapon, which detonated by firing one mass of uranium down a cylinder into another mass to create a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. It was delivered by the B-29 Enola Gay (on display at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum), it detonated at an altitude of 1,800 feet over Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. In the mid-1990s, the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution found itself at the. The Mk I bomb, nicknamed 'Little Boy,' was the first nuclear weapon used in warfare. Overview of the Smithsonian/Enola Gay Controversy.
