Bogeyfilminspirednames of the deadliest weapons

I KNOW the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 was called Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mother.

However, a mate tells me the bomb itself had a name, but can’t remember what it was. Can you help, Queries Man? – G. The two bombs dropped, on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later, were very different.

The Hiroshima bomb was codenamed “Little Boy” and was a guntype fission weapon, which derived its explosive power from the nuclear fission of uranium-235. This was accomplished by shooting a hollow cylinder of enriched uranium (the “bullet”) on to a solid cylinder of the same material and was developed from the first version of the bomb, which was known as “Thin Man”.

The Nagasaki bomb was an implosion-type nuclear weapon with a solid plutonium core and had the code name “Fat Man”.

The names for all three were created by Robert Serber, a physicist.

According to Serber, he chose them based on their shapes.

The Thin Man was a long device, and its name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel and series of movies of the same name.

The Fat Man was round and fat, and was named after Sydney Greenstreet’s Kasper Gutman character in The Maltese Falcon.

And Little Boy was named after Elisha Cook, Jr.’s character in the same film, as referred to by Humphrey Bogart.