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I always thought it was because little boy was made if uranium which japanese intelligence had a pretty good idea of how much the US could produce in a year. Fat man was based on the more readily available plutonium but the detonation was more uncertain. Thus the test bomb produced by the manhattan project was also a plutonium bomb trying out the implosion detonation mechanism. Although never tested before the physics ov achieving supercriticality for a uranium bomb where never in doubt.



Thanks, I didn't know that. As usual it's probably a mix of factors.




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