Abstract
The Little Boy lookalike in front of a partially restored B-29 bomber at a Boeing hangar in Witchita.
With a Little Boy in the back
In today's security-obsessed, post-9/11 era, one might think that it would be difficult to haul a convincing replica of an atomic bomb across the country. Not so, as John Coster-Mullen inadvertently proved in October 2004.
“We drove a full-scale WMD 800 miles across the United States and no one stopped or questioned us,” Coster-Mullen told me. “In fact, it was quite easy!”
In this case, the “weapon of mass destruction” would more appropriately be called a “weapon of mass duplication”–a nearly 600-pound, shiny steel replica of “Little Boy,” the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, painstakingly recreated by Coster-Mullen with help from his son Jason.
Last year, the president of the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum in Utah contacted Coster-Mullen and commissioned him to create a Little Boy look-alike for the airfield's modest museum. The 509th Composite Group, which was responsible for “delivering” the atomic bombs to Japan, trained during World War II with B-29 bombers at the isolated Wendover Field.
Building the imitation Little Boy–naturally without the original's inner workings–was a tremendous amount of work, Coster-Mullen said, and it gave him a “whole new appreciation for what those scientists and technicians did almost 60 years ago.” With the benefit of modern metal-working tools, it took Coster-Mullen and his son a full week at a metal fabrication shop in Milwaukee to cut all the sheet metal to cover a wooden skeleton. The final assembly took the father-son team another three weeks of 12-18 hour days at what they dubbed the “Los Alamos East-Waukesha Assembly Facility”–otherwise known as the Coster-Mullens' Wisconsin garage.
Building a Little Boy replica is not Coster-Mullen's first “nuclear project”; the historian is also author of Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man (reviewed in the November/December 2004 Bulletin), a book that covers the design and construction of the weapons in exhaustive detail. It's not surprising, then, that he applied the same attention to detail to his museum-bound mock bomb.
October 8, 2004: Mike Kuryla, survivor of the Indianapolis sinking, signs “For the boys of the Indianapolis” on the replica.
“We tried to duplicate everything we saw on the actual bomb,” Coster-Mullen said. He enlarged photos of the real Little Boy, taken at different angles, in order to reproduce the finer points–like the correct bolt position on the nose and the location of the pullout wires on top. “We wanted it to look as if it was just ready to be lifted into the Enola Gay,” he said. Except for the bomb's antennas, which Coster-Mullen included on his replica; on the real bomb, the antennas weren't installed until after the bomb was lifted into the B-29. He wanted to match everything, right down to the shade of paint–which is harder than one might imagine, Coster-Mullen said, since there is no record of exactly what color the real Little Boy was painted. (He ended up choosing a very dark green.)
When the replica was ready, Coster-Mullen loaded it into a bright yellow Penske moving truck with a forklift. As it rested on a specially made stand, he and Jason put on the finishing touches–lift lugs, safety wires, pullout wires, electrical plugs, and the antennas.
Jason Coster-Mullen grinds a steel section of the fake bomb in the family garage. The fiberglass nose rests on the 300-pound steel tail section at right.
The mock bomb's final destination was Wendover, but before giving his fake Little Boy to the museum, Coster-Mullen drove it to the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas, for a surprise appearance at a 509th Composite Group reunion.
During World War II, Boeing's Wichita plant manufactured hundreds of B-29 Stratofortress bombers–the kind that dropped the atomic bombs. Since 2000, volunteers at Boeing, in conjunction with the U.S. Aviation Museum, have been restoring an original B-29 to flying condition. It was in front of this partly restored bomber, Doc, that many surviving members and widows of the 509th, including Enola Gay crew and one survivor of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, signed the replica.
But before that could happen, Coster-Mullen had to get his fake bomb past Boeing security. “They knew we were coming,” Coster-Mullen said. “But here's this atomic bomb inside our truck, and we were like, gulp! Our contact drove up at the right moment and greased the skids for us to get in.”
When the reunion attendees saw the replica, “Jaws dropped,” Coster-Mullen said. “We were not quite prepared for the response we got.”
Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets signed the replica with a silver permanent marker–in the same place he signed the original. Coster-Mullen recounted that upon seeing the bomb, Tibbets said half-jokingly, “I've seen one of these before.”
Better than exit polls?
All this talk about the presidential election hinging on Ohio and Florida. Didn't George W. Bush and John Kerry realize that the outcome of the race depended on something other than ballot returns? Surely Karl Rove knew that it was crucial that Bush win the Weekly Reader presidential poll, that he thin his eyebrows, and root for neither the Boston Red Sox nor the St. Louis Cardinals to play in the World Series–just some of the wacky predictors of presidential futures. Here are some others, and how they fared this election:
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After the signing and speeches in Wichita, Coster-Mullen handed the truck keys to James Petersen, president of the Wendover Airfield Museum. His son, Thomas Petersen, is the museum's historian, who told me that when he saw the replica he thought first about “how such a ‘small’ thing so greatly changed the course of human history,” and then chuckled at the possibility of his father being pulled over while driving the bomb replica to the museum.
The Wendover Airfield Museum will exhibit the Little Boy replica in a limited-access room beginning in late 2004 as part of a special display on the 509th Composite Group. “The bomb represents an important piece of world, national, and Utah history, and we wanted to be able to help the visitors be able to make the connection from this quiet airfield to the rest of the world we live in,” Petersen said. “[It's] kind of like being able to see the ‘shot heard ‘round the world.’”
The Wendover replica is finished, but the “Waukesha Assembly Facility” may have more bomb-making days ahead–Coster-Mullen says two other sites have contacted him about building Little Boy or Fat Man replicas.
Weird science
Herring need not say “excuse me” after passing wind.
Their flatulence says it for them.
Literally.
Researchers say a fast repetitive tick (given the apt acronym “FRT”) that expels gas from a herring's anal duct area allows it to warn other herring of impending danger. “It's sort of a bonding thing,” biology professor Lawrence Dill of Canada's Simon Fraser University told the Guardian. “But then pre-adolescent boys have been doing this for a millennium” (October 5, 2004).
Toot, toot! An Ig Nobel went to scientists studying herring communication.
This eccentric research appeals to perhaps only two groups: those with a financial stake in herring and the editors at Annals of Improbable Research, who award offbeat scientific achievements with the equally offbeat Ig Nobel prize. Dill and four other researchers won the 2004 Ig Nobel in biology.
As usual, the Ig Nobel ceremony, held in front of an audience of 1,200 at Harvard's Sanders Theater last September, was a zany affair. Audience members filled the air of the auditorium with paper airplanes every time a winner accepted a prize, and genuine Nobel laureates Richard Roberts, William Lipscomb, and Dudley Herschbach treated the crowd to a rousing bout of hula hooping.
Ig Nobel peace prize-winner Daisuke Inoue of Japan received one of the longest ovations in Ig Nobel history. It was heartfelt thanks for Inoue's contribution to world peace: karaoke. The cheers stopped only so the crowd could serenade Inoue with Frankie Valli's “Can't Take My Eyes Off of You.”
Touched, Inoue told the crowd, “One time I had a dream to teach people to sing, so I invented karaoke. I didn't know it would be the start of something big. Now more than ever, I want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” To hammer home his point, he followed his acceptance speech with a karaoke version of the Coca-Cola jingle, “I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing.”
Other winning research included a study on the correlation between country music and suicide, an investigation of the “five-second rule,” and a breakdown of the physics of hula hooping–hence the hula hooping laureates. Ig Nobel favorite C. W. Moeliker, a 2003 winner for his study of homosexual necrophilia among male mallards (see January/February 2004 Bulletin), returned to deliver the night's offkeynote address.
Fourteen years after their inception, the Ig Nobels are starting to look polished–perhaps too polished for the devoted. “I thought [the ceremony] was great,” Roberts told the Guardian. “It would have been better if it had been a little more disorganized. It's starting to appear a bit professional, which is not a good thing.”
In Brief
Part of the Bush administration's pre-election playbook included efforts to counter negative war news from Iraq with a good-news campaign (Washington Post, September 30, 2004). First step: Stop distributing reports of the number of daily attacks by insurgents (that information continued to go to Pentagon contractors and grantees, but not to Congress or the media). Second, set up a speakers' bureau to deliver good-news accounts at military bases in the United States. Of course, feeding Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi some Bush campaign talking points to use in his speech to Congress probably helped, too.
The typical U.S. soldier in the Mesopotamian desert needs three to four gallons of water a day, reports Noah Shachtman (Wired News, September 22). Delivering that much water to an army is a serious drain on resources. So the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded a company called Sciperio a $4 million contract to begin working on a process to remove moisture from the air. The first step in Sciperio's system is to pass air over liquid lithium chloride, which quickly traps water as vapor. Unfortunately, the end product is an undrinkable fluid that must be filtered by reverse osmosis–several times–to be potable. Making a filtration machine efficient enough to be practical is the challenge. Meanwhile, Schachtman reports that DARPA has awarded a $2.5 million contract to LexCarb, which is working on a way to produce water by adding oxygen to hydrogen from the cooled-down diesel exhaust from the army's tanks.
If American soldiers stay in the Iraqi desert long enough, perhaps they'll one day benefit from a biomimetic product–a new type of smart clothing. On October 4, the British Information Services issued a press release describing a joint research project by the University of Bath and the London College of Fashion. The two co-developed a fabric that mimics the action of pinecones as they open to drop seeds. The fabric “opens up” when it is hot but shuts out air when it is cold. The material has a top layer of tiny (1/200th of a millimeter-wide) spikes of water-absorbent material combined with a non-porous lower layer.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) doled out the dollars for its employees at a November 2003 awards ceremony, spending $500 on cheese displays, $81,000 on honorary plaques, $1,500 on three balloon arches, and $5,000 on official photographs. In total, the bash cost nearly half a million dollars, according to a report by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general (Associated Press, October 13).
All kinds of experiments have been conducted to see what plants are best at taking up radioactive contamination in the soil near Chernobyl or at sites where nuclear weapons have been tested. The latest such experiment was announced in a Geological Society of America press release on November 5. The purpose of the test was to see which plant removed the most depleted uranium (DU) from weapons testing grounds in an exceedingly dry area. A team from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, sponsored by the Defense Department, found that although Indian mustard absorbed DU, Russian thistle, quinoa, and purple amaranth needed less moisture. The best-for-the-purpose plant, Russian thistle, is a tumbleweed, so if its use were to be widely adopted, the plants would have to be harvested before they matured and set out on their famous windblown, seed-spreading journeys. (Researchers had good reason to believe they were likely to succeed in their search for plants that absorb uranium: Old-time uranium prospectors used to train Geiger counters on junipers to locate buried uranium lodes.)
The air force is making news with the revelation that it spent $25,000 for a report that urged an additional $7.5 million be spent on research into telekinesis–psychic teleportation–the moving of men or objects through sheer concentrated brain power (USA Today, November 5). The Air Force Research Lab's August “Teleportation Physics Report” concluded that telekinesis is “quite real and can be controlled.”
Forget the Manhattan Project and the nascent U.S. weapons complex, says author Carter Hydrick (Utah's Daily Herald, November 18). His new book Critical Mass: How Nazi Germany Surrendered Enriched Uranium for the United States' Atomic Bomb, argues that the real source of fissionable material for the first U.S. atomic weapon was a 1,200-pound load of enriched uranium carried on a German submarine headed for Japan. After the U-boat surrendered to the U.S. Navy in May 1944, says Hydrick, the previously lagging U.S. atomic project was quickly able to fabricate and drop atomic weapons on Japan.
Thank you!
The Bulletin expresses its deep gratitude to the following foundations and family trusts whose generous support in 2004 made possible our continued publication:
Compton Foundation
Kenneth M. Jones Trust/Up the River Endeavors
Leighty Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The Ploughshares Fund
Prospect Hill Foundation
Sisyphus Philanthropic Fund
Stewart R. Mott Charitable Trust
Samuel Rubin Foundation
Theodore Taylor
Theodore Taylor, the father of the miniature atomic bomb and a self-professed “nuclear dropout,” died on October 28, 2004 of heart disease. He was 79.
Taylor's unique role in the arms race began at Los Alamos in 1949. While others at Los Alamos busied themselves with the hydrogen bomb, Taylor sought to shrink the atom bomb without sacrificing any of its force. He attacked his task with zeal and unwavering focus, designing one miniature weapon after another. (Each shared a comicbook villain name–“Scorpion,” “Wasp,” “Bee,” “Viper,” “Cobra,” “Zombie,” and “Hornet.”) His efforts culminated in the development of the smallest fission bomb of the era, the “Davy Crockett,” which weighed 51 pounds and nearly fit into a suitcase.
Ted Taylor in 1986.
The work consumed him, and Taylor ignored all else–including the birth of his second daughter. “Instead of being with my wife, Caro, I had spent the day at a military intelligence office, poring over aerial photographs of Moscow, placing the sharp point of a compass in Red Square, and drawing circles corresponding to distances at which moderate and severe damage would result from the explosion at different heights of a 500-kiloton made-in-America bomb,” he revealed in a 1996 Bulletin article. “I remember feeling disappointed because none of the circles included all of Moscow.”
Long after Taylor swore off weapons work, he visited Red Square. Remembering that he once schemed to annihilate it, emotion overcame him. “I cried,” he wrote. “Yes, my work at Los Alamos had been so intellectually stimulating, so compelling, but so insane.”
After adding the massive Super Oralloy Bomb (commonly referred to as the SOB because of its gigantic yield) to his nuclear legacy, Taylor left Los Alamos in 1956 to spearhead Project Orion. He envisioned building a 16-story spacecraft, propelled by 2,000 nuclear bombs, that could travel to Mars and Saturn. The 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, along with design hurdles, squelched this dream, and Taylor took a job at the Defense Department. Here, he realized his passion for nuclear weaponry had been greatly misguided.
“I became privy to the actual characteristics and deployments of what, by then, were thousands of nuclear weapons,” he recalled in the Bulletin. “And I discovered willful deception at all levels of government concerning the effects of nuclear weapons on people, on buildings, on military equipment, on everything.”
Taylor dedicated the remainder of his life to hastening arms control and denouncing all things nuclear. He railed against nuclear energy, advocated alternative energy, and served on the president's commission on the Three Mile Island accident. Although this work did not satisfy his scientific curiosities, he regarded it as his most important contribution to the atomic age.
“The work of disarmament is not as intellectually compelling, perhaps,” Taylor wrote in the Bulletin. “But the rewards are far greater.”