Pacific Disaster: Little Boy detonates on Tinian Island

[reddie]

What would happen if Little Boy exploded on the Northern Marianas Island air base on the evening before it was to be loaded onto the Enola Gay?

Louis Alvarez thought this was possible, although a long shot. If the uranium rings all slammed together at once, fission would begin; this might get hot enough to trigger the bomb's detonators.

So, what if it happened, and wiped the air base on Tinian off the map? Would Japan have noticed something unusual occuring all the way out in the Marianas? And what would Truman's response have been?

Incidentally, some of the Manhattan Project's best scientists were on Tinian, including Alvarez himself; the Project would have been seriously affected.

 

[Mysterion]

Don't know if Japanese Intel would have been good enough to detect this happening.

I will say that after a quick investigation, Fat Man is brought into play and used in place of Little Boy.

 

[wietze]

It wouldn't wipe the island off the map to start with.
If fission would start from the uranium going critical it would get rather hot, but it still still would not trigger the detonators correctly.

The Blast would be just like a big conventional blast, although a dirty blast in this case, spreading radioactive material.

 

[The Oncoming Storm]

They were so worried about an accidental detonation caused by Enola Gay crashing on take off that the detonators and other components were removed from the bomb before take off and had to be reinserted during the flight. In order to do this an expert on the bomb had to crawl into the bomb bay and reassemble the firing mechanism, this had only previously been done in the workshop at Los Alamos under highly controlled conditions and therefore there was a risk that the bomb could have accidentally detonated during this procceedure. Many early atomic bombs were designed so that the core could be inserted in flight shortly before the bomb was dropped as a safety feature.

 

[Gridley]

They were worried about it, but at least a few of them were worried that setting off the Trinity Gadget would ignite the Earth's atmosphere and result in The End of the World as We Know It. We know now that was impossible.

The problem with cutting edge technology is that its cuts both ways.

As noted above, Little Boy could have been a dirty bomb on Tinian, but not a true fission device until it was already in the air. A dirty bomb would have been a set back, but Fat Man would still have been dropped. Maybe a week or two later, but one failure wouldn't be enough to offset Trinity's success.

I'm sure there would be long-term and short-term consequences galore, but the Pacific War would end almost exactly the same way it did IOTL.