Three days later, another B-29 Superfortress bomber dropped a second atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, marking the last time a nuclear weapon has been used in armed conflict. ‘The whole sky lit up when it exploded….there was nothing but a black boiling mess hanging over the city…you wouldn’t have known that the city of Hiroshima was there,’ Tibbets recalled in a 1989 interview.īetween 70,000-90,000 perished in an instant, somewhere between 130,000-200,000 more are said to have died in the coming years from the aftereffects of the bomb. Just over 40 seconds later it detonated at an altitude of around 2,000 feet above the city with the energy of around 15 kilotons of TNT, heralding in a new and devastating era of warfare. Tibbets guided the plane, named after his mother Enola Gay, from Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean towards its intended target – the Japanese city of Hiroshima.Īt 33,000 feet, the bomb was released. In the early hours of 6 August 1945, Colonel Paul Tibbets climbed aboard a B-29 Superfortress bomber loaded with a 10,000-pound atomic bomb nicknamed 'Little Boy'.
