![]() ![]() ![]() To put it another way, they were products of the circumstances in which they were created, and those circumstances would not apply to any nation building a bomb since then. Both the Mark 1 and Mark 3 were complex, dangerous and wasteful designs that were largely obsolete before they were ever used, but were products of the state of both the weaponeers art and also of American nuclear industry at the time. I say prototype because the production Mark 3 that formed the basis of the first US stockpile had several improvements over the actual wartime weapons. The “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima was officially designated a Mark 1 bomb and the Nagasaki bomb, while not having an official designation, can be thought of as a Mark 3 prototype (The Mark 2 was a plutonium gun design that turned out to be unfeasible due to pre-detonation of plutonium 240). They were not the best design Los Alamos could produce, even when they were built, but they were the quickest ones that could be gotten out the door. The bombs used by the United States in World War two were very much a product of their times and the environment in which they were created. This led to a discussion on what the Israeli arsenal might have actually looked like and whether a “Nagasaki type” bomb was in fact a reasonable assumption for a fledgling nuclear weapons state in 1973. One could speculate further that most of the inventory was in the form of aerial bombs (probably configured for the Mirage) and some were early prototypes of missile warheads for the Jericho I (which in October 1973 was apparently not yet operational). T is plausible that on the eve of the 1973 War Israel had a small nuclear inventory of weapons, say, between ten to twenty first-generation fission (PU) weapons (roughly, Nagasaki-type). This perception came up on Arms Control Wonk in an article on the 1973 Yom Kippur war by Avner Cohen in which he states: When we talk about cars people don’t think of the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, when we discuss airplanes the Wright Flyer isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, yet when you mention an atomic bomb odds are that one of the WWII devices is what people will think of. Certainly they were notable as the first bombs, the only ones used in anger, and the most famous devices in a subject shrouded in secrecy, but times have moved on while perceptions largely have not. The first Atomic bombs, Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, hold an outsized place in our perceptions of what a nuclear weapon should be. ![]() This is a guest post on behalf of ACW reader and occasional contributor Chris Camp. ![]()
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