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What Hacker News says
- I was able to access via Firefox/W7 without issue. Incredible story but you can also see the results he had even on Wikipedia as his diagrams are used for Fat Man and Little Boy. His book is on Amazon and most of the buyers work with nuclear weapons or engineering.
Look up Atom Bombs on Amazon by John Coster-Mullen.
- For anyone truly interested in Little Boy and Fat Man, do yourself a favor and pick up Atom Bombs by John Coster-Mullen.
It's self-published, and he's a great fellow; he'll email you and offer to sign your copy, as well as answer any questions you've got.
http://www.amazon.com/Atom-Bombs-Secret-Inside-Little/dp/B00...
This next year is the 70th anniversary of the Trinity test, which is open to the public once a year: http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/default.aspx
Edit: He's also the guy who deduced the most probable internal configuration of Little Boy, and built an inert 1:1 scale model which was presented to and signed by the living members of the 509th Bomb Wing.
- > which he immediately lifted up due to the intense heat.
Had he not made this instinctive move, everyone present would have perished and the area would have remained deadly until some other poor soul came upon the tragedy to stop the reaction.
The first-hand accounts of those present are in the thorough official report, which just happens to be collected in John Coster-Mullen's Atom Bombs book.
- > Can you provide some evidence regarding intelligence of truck drivers?
Sure. This very article. Some non-truck drivers were apparently pretty impressed with the truck driver's book:
The review, written by the eminent atomic historian Robert S. Norris, began, “For many years, Coster-Mullen has been printing his manuscript at Kinko’s (adding to and revising it along the way) and selling spiral-bound copies at conferences or over the Internet.” Norris clearly considered Coster-Mullen’s understanding of the bomb superior to his own.
My own copy of “Atom Bombs” soon arrived in the mail, along with a sheet of testimonials from Harold Agnew, the former director of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, who was aboard the Enola Gay when it annihilated Hiroshima (a “most amazing document”); Philip Morrison, one of the physicists who helped invent the bomb (“You have done a remarkable job”); and Paul Tibbets, the commander and pilot of the Enola Gay (“I was very much impressed”).
Incidentally, can you provide some evidence regarding the intelligence of software engineers?
See how that feels?
- And a New Yorker profile of John Coster-Mullen the author of Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_...
