The 1945 Trinity test was run to prove the complicated “Fat Man” design would even work. But why were scientists so confident of the “Little Boy” design that the didn’t feel the need to do a full test of the design? The design was simpler, but still, no one had ever done it before. Was it purely for time? Lack of materials? Or was the design and principles so sound, it couldn’t fail?
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It can’t fail.
If you fire a “particle” at some uranium, it knocks off another instance of the same particle and releases energy.
If you can fashion a shape big enough (a “critical mass”) to maximize the second particle’s chances of hitting another atom of uranium then you get a chain reaction, or “bomb”. Turns out that any seven inch diameter of uranium will destroy your city.
The trick, of course, is to get that globe over Hiroshima without killing yourself in the first place, so Little Boy was a Navy gun with half the globe at the muzzle and the other half in the breech. Drop the bomb, fire the gun at a pre-determined altitude/pressure and bye-bye Hiroshima.
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