With World War II in its fourth year, Navy Captain William Parsons had wanted—indeed expected—to be commanding ships at sea at this point in his career. But fate, and his own special capabilities, had prevented that. Now, in the predawn darkness of an August morning, he was instead rather unceremoniously lugging two metal cans, together weighing just under 138 pounds, across a runway on a small island in the western Pacific. Even before the sun made its debut, the late-summer heat was evident as beads of sweat formed on his balding pate.
“Deak,” as he was known to his friends, wrestled the two cans into a large aircraft and squeezed into the sweltering compartment already occupied by the poorly named “Little Boy.” At nearly 11 feet long and weighing 9,700 pounds, the unique bomb took up much of the available space in the aircraft’s bomb bay. Eleven other men manned their stations in the aircraft, and soon all were airborne and headed northeast away from the airfield on Tinian. Parsons was technically a mere passenger in the Army Air Forces B-29 bomber named after the pilot’s mother, but with his two cans of uranium 235, he was an important one.
Deak had last been to sea as gunnery officer on board the USS Detroit (CL-8) in 1939. Having already been heavily involved in the development of radar in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he had been pleased to play a key role in developing the revolutionary proximity fuse that would vastly improve the efficiency of antiaircraft rounds in the coming struggle. But he was not so pleased when his technical prowess caught the eye of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush. Parsons soon found himself drafted into a top-secret project—code-named Manhattan—that would keep him ashore for the duration of the war.
As the Enola Gay winged her way at high altitude toward an unsuspecting city in Japan, Parsons worked in the now frigid bomb bay, inserting the two uranium masses into the weapon. Amid bucking turbulence in the extremely cramped space, with his fingers close to frostbitten, Deak carried out the tasks he had rehearsed hundreds of times in the 100-degree heat on the ground. Sometimes lying under the giant bomb, sometimes straddling it, he tested barometric switches, wired complex circuitry, removed various pins, and gradually transformed the tungsten cylinder into the deadliest weapon yet devised by man.
Parsons was arming the atomic bomb in flight because of the very real possibility that an electrical discharge or a sudden jolt could cause a premature detonation. Better to lose 12 men and a single B-29 than the entire island of Tinian.
With less than five minutes to target, Captain Parsons completed his work. The rest was up to Little Boy. At 0915, the bomb dropped from the belly of the silver aircraft and plummeted downward toward Hiroshima. At less than a thousand feet above ground, a great cataclysmic burst of fission changed the world forever.
Although Deak would hold several important shore commands, he never did get the seagoing command he wanted. While other naval officers had brought about the great victory at sea in the Pacific theater using guns, periscopes, and tailhooks, Captain William Sterling Parsons had done his part—one with far greater consequences—with a slide rule. Yet, in one of those great historical ironies, while thousands would die as a result of Parsons’ handiwork, countless thousands of others would live. Little Boy, and a second bomb called “Fat Man,” would help convince the Japanese to surrender, ending the war without a bloody invasion that would have cost incalculable casualties on both sides.
Beyond the immediate effect of helping to end the greatest conflict in history, the incredibly bright flash that signaled Little Boy’s detonation made clear that warfare had crossed a threshold, that old assumptions had been rendered inadequate, and ramifications had entered a new dimension. The debut of that terrible weapon gave mankind the ability to kill and destroy vastly more efficiently than had ever been possible before. Yet that same efficiency—with all its attendant horror—had the potential to serve as a major deterrent to that killing and destruction.
The devastation wrought by that first bomb would grow to unfathomable proportions as the proverbial genie took up his work outside the bottle, introducing a new vocabulary that would spawn such terms as “megatons” and “mutually assured destruction.” The magnitude of that potential destruction demanded a new philosophy, born of common sense and providing a perverse calculus that would inhibit—and hopefully eliminate—all but the most illogical warmongering.
For at least the next 80 years, mankind would exist in an oxymoronic new world, enduring the constant foreboding that comes with living in the shadow of Deak Parsons’ Little Boy, while at the same time successfully avoiding a repeat of the kind of struggle that gave birth to it.
