Little Boy Blows Up Tinian Island

Delta Force

Banned
I have not seen a discussion on this Manhattan Project point of divergence, but it is an interesting one. What if Little Boy were to explode during a handling accident or during a failed takeoff or emergency landing of the Enola Gay, destroying half of Tinian Island and the 509th Composite Air Group? Does the invasion of Japan go ahead as planned, and how long does it take for the USAAF to regain the ability to carry out nuclear strikes (seeing as many of the special aircraft and key personnel are vaporized)?
 
I have not seen a discussion on this Manhattan Project point of divergence, but it is an interesting one. What if Little Boy were to explode during a handling accident or during a failed takeoff or emergency landing of the Enola Gay, destroying half of Tinian Island and the 509th Composite Air Group? Does the invasion of Japan go ahead as planned, and how long does it take for the USAAF to regain the ability to carry out nuclear strikes (seeing as many of the special aircraft and key personnel are vaporized)?

Wikipedia says the cordite explosive for the gun mechanism was not loaded into the bomb until after takeoff, for exactly this reason.
 
Wikipedia says the cordite explosive for the gun mechanism was not loaded into the bomb until after takeoff, for exactly this reason.

It's been said that it was a crash on Tinian a few days beforehand which alerted the scientists to this threat. Perhaps it doesn't crash but Enola Gay does...
 
There is another bomb coming, and the invasion wasn't scheduled until the Autumn, so I guess they act more carefully and see what bomb number 2 can do

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
There is another bomb coming, and the invasion wasn't scheduled until the Autumn, so I guess they act more carefully and see what bomb number 2 can do

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

The US has just lost it's biggest airbase and a large number of important personnel who'll need to replaced, I think there's a good chance the invasion would be delayed until spring 1946, unless the Soviets force the Japanese to surrender before then.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
The US has just lost it's biggest airbase and a large number of important personnel who'll need to replaced, I think there's a good chance the invasion would be delayed until spring 1946, unless the Soviets force the Japanese to surrender before then.

This base was just for bombers, too far for the close support planes need for the invasion. The invasion happens as scheduled or the Japanese surrender due to the Soviets entering the war.
 
The US has just lost it's biggest airbase and a large number of important personnel who'll need to replaced, I think there's a good chance the invasion would be delayed until spring 1946, unless the Soviets force the Japanese to surrender before then.

Well it probably depends on where it goes off, the 10psi damage would level the airfield and tear up the North two runways but probably not completely destroy the remaining runways. It would also not do anything to the secondary base on the south end of the island. If its an Air burst - even only a couple thousand feet in the air and a couple thousand feet off the end of the runway then it doesn't destroy the runways, but does damage to the infrastructure and destroys quite a few aircraft (basically any on the North airfield) and kills any one not behind walls from the heat flash. But there would not be the debris strike behind the fireball that caused the firestorm since this is not happening in a city. Also since they basically don't know anything about the radiation dangers in either case they are just going to fix the runway and keep working - which long term will cause much higher cancer deaths for the service men on Tinian. Short term it wouldn't cause a whole lot more damage than the "normal" damage and creation that the SeaBees were already working around. They would still have heavy equipment because quite a bit of their equipment was working on expanding the southern airbase which would be completely outside the area of effect of either of the WWII nukes.

The other thing to note is that since they were worried about this happening they already had cleared the area and had most of the flight crews under cover - probably not enough cover if it is a ground burst but probably fine to protect from an air burst.

Tom.
 
Well it probably depends on where it goes off, the 10psi damage would level the airfield and tear up the North two runways but probably not completely destroy the remaining runways. It would also not do anything to the secondary base on the south end of the island. If its an Air burst - even only a couple thousand feet in the air and a couple thousand feet off the end of the runway then it doesn't destroy the runways, but does damage to the infrastructure and destroys quite a few aircraft (basically any on the North airfield) and kills any one not behind walls from the heat flash. But there would not be the debris strike behind the fireball that caused the firestorm since this is not happening in a city. Also since they basically don't know anything about the radiation dangers in either case they are just going to fix the runway and keep working - which long term will cause much higher cancer deaths for the service men on Tinian. Short term it wouldn't cause a whole lot more damage than the "normal" damage and creation that the SeaBees were already working around. They would still have heavy equipment because quite a bit of their equipment was working on expanding the southern airbase which would be completely outside the area of effect of either of the WWII nukes.

The other thing to note is that since they were worried about this happening they already had cleared the area and had most of the flight crews under cover - probably not enough cover if it is a ground burst but probably fine to protect from an air burst.

Tom.

In the long term the main danger to the runways in the South would be radiation, groundbursts give off a hell of a lot more. Many would also be blinded if looking int he direction of the blast at the time, although thankfully most would still be asleep.
 
In the long term the main danger to the runways in the South would be radiation, groundbursts give off a hell of a lot more. Many would also be blinded if looking int he direction of the blast at the time, although thankfully most would still be asleep.

In that days they have no idea of radiation poisoning , so they will keep using that air base.

Anyway, even the bomber crashing does not mean the bomb goes off ...
 
In that days they have no idea of radiation poisoning , so they will keep using that air base.

Anyway, even the bomber crashing does not mean the bomb goes off ...

I think in either case they keep using both airbases.

And the POD is somehow (no definition of how) Little Boy blows up either on the run way or just after takeoff.
 
In that days they have no idea of radiation poisoning , so they will keep using that air base.

They knew about acute radiation sickness, although they didn't have much in the way of details. And they knew radiation caused cancer, but they didn't know how much, and believed there was a threshold below which it was safe. (For that matter, we're still not certain there isn't...)

They'll know enough to keep people away until radiation has died down to levels that won't cause short-term symptoms. Take a look here for a map of fallout plumes from a 10-kiloton groundburst. The purple zone is the area where radiation dosages exceed 10 R/hr. Note this does NOT include the dose from the initial pulse, just fallout. You need to absorb a cumulative dose of about 100 R to have any risk of suffering short-term effects. Just eyeballing it, it looks like most of the island will take a cumulative dose sufficient to cause acute radiation syndrome. That doesn't mean everyone will die, mind you, or even most people, but some will.

Long-term, radiation will decay as approximately the (-1.2)th power of time over the first two years. After a month, areas with a dose rate of 10 R/hr at two days after the blast will drop to a dose rate of 0.31 R/hr.

As far as cancer effects go, I happened to look up the US evacuation plans for Trinity for another project recently. The government planned to start evacuating towns if projected cumulative dose exceeded 75 R. The current EPA limit for civilian radiation exposure is about 0.1 R. According to the NAS, 75 R will ultimately cause cancer in approximately 7.5% of the people exposed.
 
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