Although the nuclear bomb was completed, it lacked a means to transport it. Thus, a program named Silverplate, was created in order to provide a means of transport. Under the Silverplate program, batches of improved B-29 bombers were produced specifically designed to carry and use atomic ordinance. The B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, which dropped the Little Boy nuclear bomb at Hiroshima was produced under the Silverplate program alongside fifteen other bombers between February and June 1945. The B-29 Bomber responsible for the Hiroshima bombing received its name on August 5, 1945 by Lt. Col Paul W. Tibbets. He christened it the Enola Gay, his mother 's maiden name, after his mother who contrary to his father encouraged him to become a pilot. Then …show more content…
Paul Tibbets was an expert in aerial bombing and knew that the bomb would detonate at roughly fifteen hundred feet and so when he dropped the bomb he had already began to hightail it back over the Sea of Japan. Thus, he did not see the resulting explosion but did see what he called a ‘stinger’, as it was “Black as hell, and it had light and colours and white in it and grey colour in it and the top was like a folded-up Christmas tree.” He returned to Tinian at 2:58 in the afternoon, having had a successful and relatively uneventful run.
Although Paul Tibbets failed to witness the tragedy of the bombing, many experienced its horrors first hand. The initial blast of the Little Boy atomic bomb exploded with the force of twenty-thousand tons of TNT, wiping out five square miles of the city. Over one-hundred and forty-thousand people died in the initial blast, but those who died were lucky. Many who were on the outskirts of the city, accumulated huge doses of radiation leading to radiation poisoning and its debilitating effects, mainly bloody stool, vomiting, general weakness and fatigue, and the development of ulcers. To make matters worse,