Atom Bombs; The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man
John Coster-Mullen (cover photograph) John Coster-Mullen, 2003. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Spiral bound. Format is approximately 8.5 inches by 11 inches. 341, [1] pages. RARE. Decorative front cover. Clear plastic front cover sheet Contents include Trinity, Beginnings, Little Boy, Hiroshima, Fat Man, Nagasaki, Appendices: Project Alberta Tinian Team Members, Assigned Aircraft, Special Bombing Missions to Japan, Hiroshima Mission Plans and Crews, Nagasaki Mission Planes and Crews, Operation CROSSROADS Plane and Crew, Little Boy and Fat Man Units, 1945 Timetable, Bomb Display Locations, Illustrations. Documents, Bibliography. Sources, and Endnotes. The author has stated that all information contained in this book was obtained from open sources. This book is Dedicated to Chuck Hansen. John Coster-Mullen (21 December 1946 – 24 April 2021) was an American industrial photographer, truck driver and nuclear archaeologist who played an important role in creating a public record of the design of the first atomic bombs. He is known for his critically-acclaimed self-published book Atom Bombs: The Top Secret, Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man. This book was used by Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) author Dr. Robert S. Norris as the primary source for information on both bombs in his monumental "Racing For The Bomb" biography of General Groves published in 2002. In 1993, with the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaching, Coster-Mullen decided that he could earn some money creating models of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs and selling them online or through hobby shops. Some companies were already making them, but Coster-Mullen noticed that their models contained small errors, and he believed that he could do a better job. He began collecting all the material he could about their design. With permission, he visited the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where bombs were on display, along with the Boeing B-29 Bockscar, which had dropped a Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki. While there he found that the 509th Composite Group, the unit that carried out the bombing raids, was holding a reunion in Chicago. There he met various former members of the 509th Composite Group, including Charles Sweeney and Charles Donald Albury, the pilot and co-pilot who flew Bockscar on the Nagasaki mission. Thereafter, Coster-Mullen regularly attended reunions of the 509th Composite Group. The fiftieth reunion in 1995 was held in Albuquerque and Los Alamos, New Mexico, and they decided to invite the Project Alberta personnel, many of whom had worked at the wartime Los Alamos Laboratory. Most were happy to grant him interviews. He never sold a model, but the brochure that he intended to include with the models gradually grew into a 431-page book, Atom Bombs: The Top Secret, Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man (2003), as he gradually pieced together an unusually detailed account of how the weapons were built, assembled, and deployed. He was profiled by The New Yorker in 2008. He helped in 2003 American sculptor Jim Sanborn with his installation "Critical Assembly" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art which, according to Sanborn, Coster-Mullen's work started to be getting attention from the government. In 2004, he built, with his son Jason, a replica of Little Boy for the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum, the former training site of the 509th Composite Group in Utah. His most sensational discovery was that the Little Boy bomb was actually a "girl": while most historians had described the bomb as working by firing a small, solid "projectile" of enriched uranium into a larger, hollow "target," Coster-Mullen established conclusively that the projectile was a hollow set of rings which contained the majority of the uranium, and that it was fired onto a narrow target "spike" He continued revising his book until his death. He was an advisor to the National Atomic Museum, the Children of the Manhattan Project Preservation Association and the British Broadcasting Corporation, which used his work for a documentary. Excerpts from the book pertaining to the Little Boy safing and arming plugs were used by the Defense (Exhibit K) in the famous case of the United States vs. Butterfields Auctioneers (Case No. 02-2776) and were instrumental in U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston's 6/14/2002 decision to reject the government's claim to the plugs. The book was used by Japanese author Kiyoshi Souwa for his 2003 book "Hiroshima Atomic Bombing, The Meaning To Drop It At 8:15 A.M." and by English author Stephen Walker for his 2005 book "Shockwave." Condition: Very good.
Keywords: Atom Bomb, Atomic Bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 509th Composite, Enola Gay, Bockscar, Little Man, Fat Boy, Project Alberta, Tinian, Operation CROSSROADS, Trinity Test, Leslie Groves, Manhattan Project
[Book #83992]
Price: $1,000.00