What if 'Little Boy' failed?

Doctor What

Its 8:15AM on August 6th 1945 and the Enola Gay has just dropped its A-bomb over Hiroshima. Seconds tick by, then minutes.... and NOTHING happens. The bomb does not go off. It ends up crash-landing in the river instead.

What happens next? Do the Japanese recover the bomb and reverse engineer it? Can they put it back together and use it against the americans? Can they remove the uranium and use it for something else? What would the US response be to such a failure? What about the rest of the US High Command? Would they choose to hold back the Fat Boy bomb and double check to make sure the design worked? Or would they rush it out the door in the hopes of covering up any potential problems/mistakes? Was there another one or two bombs in the pipeline for them to use?
 

lope3328

It would probably be too late for the Japs to do anything, most likely scenario is that the bombing of Nagasiki will be postponed until they are sure that Fatman would work.
 

Othniel

They already knew it worked. There were prior sucessful tests. I say coverup the embrassment by going in really fast, and then sending somebody in to retrive the bomb.
 

Raymann

Banned
Well the only way it could not work is if the shaped charges either didn't go off or didn't go off right. If the latter then the bomb still explodes, but just like a regulat bomb and the goods get dispersed. If the latter it would have to not drop into the water and be ifentified by the locals as something different if the Japanese have a chance of fixing it. Even if they did and actually got the damn thing to work it still wouldn't have made a difference. The way operation Olympic was planned the forces were too spread out to be just blown off the beaches and call it quits. At worse the US government comes clean and we go on to invade Japan anyway or simply drop another nuke OTL.
 

Doctor What

Othniel said:
They already knew it worked. There were prior sucessful tests. I say coverup the embrassment by going in really fast, and then sending somebody in to retrive the bomb.
Click to expand...

Actually the Little Boy was considered a 'safe' design--they didn't even bother testing it. The Trinity test was the Nagasaki 'Fat Man' design.

This WI basically postulates that something went wrong anyway (the shaped charges were duds, somebody forgot to connect a wire, whatever).
 

robertp6165

Doctor What said:
Actually the Little Boy was considered a 'safe' design--they didn't even bother testing it. The Trinity test was the Nagasaki 'Fat Man' design.

This WI basically postulates that something went wrong anyway (the shaped charges were duds, somebody forgot to connect a wire, whatever).
Click to expand...

I think he was saying that they already knew Fat Man worked...in response to...
lope3328 said:
It would probably be too late for the Japs to do anything, most likely scenario is that the bombing of Nagasiki will be postponed until they are sure that Fatman would work.
Click to expand...
 
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