Trinity Is A Dud

WI the Trinity nuclear test turned out to be a dud? Let's say the gun mechanism misfired or the plutonium sphere wasn't compressed equally.

Given the lack of available uranium at the time and general consternation about the atomic bomb in general, how would a dud have changed US policy?
 
WI the Trinity nuclear test turned out to be a dud? Let's say the gun mechanism misfired or the plutonium sphere wasn't compressed equally. Given the lack of available uranium at the time and general consternation about the atomic bomb in general, how would a dud have changed US policy?

The back-up plan (yes, there was one :) ) was to build more Mark 1 bombs. The Mark 1 dropped on Hiroshima was jacketed with extra fissile material in the hope it would boost the yield - it didn't, the only effect of the extra jacketing was to blow the fissile material all over the city. I'd guess if Trinity had fizzled, the extra jacketing wouldn't have been applied and the Mark 1s would have used the bare minimum of fissile - and been much more efficient as a result. So still two bombs on Japan but after the war is over, a lot of head-scratching over why the implosion bomb failed.
 
FYI: the gun mechanism was the Uranium Bomb. Trinity tested the Plutonium (implosion) Bomb.

IMO if it was a hardware failure (e.g. IIRC there were thought to be potential 'issues' with the fuses timing the charges that imploded the bomb)
then they would just work out what had failed and try again.
If it just didn't work then it would have been back to the drawing board because there had been a theoretical mistake somewhere. Eventually they would work it out, redesign and try again.

As stated above, the Uranium bomb is the alternative. The Manhattan Project scientists were so sure that was going to work that they didn't even have a test explosion. However, there was a test: the gun mechanism was used to fire a Uranium 'slug' through a modified Uranium 'target'. The target was modified so that the 'slug would fly straight through at high speed, assembling a critical mass and then de-assembling it again before the chain reaction could complete. It was a complete success (e.g. monitoring showed exactly what theory predicted) The scientists were totally confident that if the 'target' hadn't been modified then the chain reaction would have occurred and hence that the bomb would explode.
 
Unless I'm much mistaken, they'd have purified more uranium & used the shotgun design. As I understand it, making plutonium was harder, & the implosion design much more difficult to get to work properly, where the uranium (shotgun) bomb was a virtual dead cert.
 
Unless I'm much mistaken, they'd have purified more uranium & used the shotgun design. As I understand it, making plutonium was harder, & the implosion design much more difficult to get to work properly, where the uranium (shotgun) bomb was a virtual dead cert.

(For bolded), it was the other way around, actually. Plutonium was (relatively) easy to produce and hard to fissile, while Uranium was hard to produce and easy to fissile.
 
Unless I'm much mistaken, they'd have purified more uranium & used the shotgun design. As I understand it, making plutonium was harder, & the implosion design much more difficult to get to work properly, where the uranium (shotgun) bomb was a virtual dead cert.

Plutonium is easier to make than U235 because it can be separated chemically rather than by isotope separation techniques. A plutonium bomb is more complex than a U235 one though.
 
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