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  1. August 6, 1945: Hiroshima, MK-I Uranium gun bomb, 9,000 pounds 15Kton yield.
  2. August 9, 1945: Nagasaki, MK-III Plutonium implosion bomb, 10,000 pounds 22Kton yield.
  • August 14, 1945: Japan surrenders.
A 3rd bomb was ready and in San Francisco, CA on August 18, 1945 scheduled to be dropped ASAP after arrival on Tinian. As the war had ended it was returned to Los Alamos.

The production schedule for additional bombs in 1945 was:

  1. September 1945: 3 MK-III Plutonium implosion bombs.
  2. October 1945: 3 MK-III Plutonium implosion bombs.
  3. November 1945: 7 MK-III Mod 1 Plutonium/Uranium composite core implosion bombs.
  4. December 1945: 7 MK-III Mod 1 Plutonium/Uranium composite core implosion bombs.

If Japan had not surrendered when it did, the US had the ability to have dropped up to 23 atomic bombs on Japan in 1945! The MK-IV (an easier to assemble, maintain, arm/disarm design) would probably have gone into production in early 1946.

While I have no precise data on the yield of the MK-III Mod 1, I assume it was probably expected to be higher than the MK-III. Probably between 30Kton and 40Kton. However it was not designed to improve yield, it was designed to balance Plutonium and Uranium production capacity (Uranium was easier to enrich to weapons grade than Plutonium was to produce in reactors).

See: Swords of Armageddon by Chuck Hansen.

Note: unforeseen events would likely have prevented meeting the full schedule of 23 bomb. One of these (wigner effect) happened in October and forced the shutdown of at least one of the three Plutonium production reactors and reduction in operating power of the others to limit the damage. However had the war still been going on then it might have been decided to sacrifice the reactors to keep production up as long as possible. Perhaps the MK-III core might even have been redesigned to be just Uranium should all three Plutonium production reactors completely fail.

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11y ago

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