B-29 bombers at the iso- lated Wendover Field.
Building the imitation Little Boy—naturally without the original’s inner workings—was a tremendous amount of work, Coster-Mullen said, and it gave him a “whole new appreciation for what those scientists and technicians did almost 60 years ago.” With the ben- efit of modern metal- working tools, it took Coster-Mullen and his son a full week at a metal fabrication shop in Mil- waukee to cut all the sheet metal to cover a wooden skeleton. The final assem-
bly took the father-son team another three weeks of 12–18 hour days at what they dubbed the
“Los Alamos East–
Waukesha Assembly Facility”—otherwise known as the Coster- Mullens’ Wisconsin garage.
Building a Little Boy replica is not Coster- Mullen’s first “nuclear project”; the historian is also author of Atom Bombs: The Top Secret In- side Story of Little Boy and Fat Man (reviewed in the November/December 2004 Bulletin), a book that covers the design and con-
N TODAY’S SECURITY- obsessed, post-9/11 era, one might think that it would be difficult to haul a convincing repli- ca of an atomic bomb across the country. Not so, as John Coster-Mullen inadvertently proved in October 2004.
“We drove a full-scale WMD 800 miles across the United States and no one stopped or questioned us,” Coster-Mullen told me. “In fact, it was quite easy!”
In this case, the “weap- on of mass destruction”
would more appropriately be called a “weapon of
mass duplication”—a nearly 600-pound, shiny steel replica of “Little Boy,” the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, painstak- ingly recreated by Coster- Mullen with help from his son Jason.
Last year, the president of the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum in Utah contacted Coster-Mullen and commissioned him to create a Little Boy look- alike for the airfield’s modest museum. The 509th Composite Group, which was responsible for
“delivering” the atomic bombs to Japan, trained during World War II with
With a Little Boy in the back
The Little Boy look- alike in front of a partially restored B-29 bomber at a Boeing hangar in Witchita.
PHOTOS COURTESY JOHN COSTER-MULLEN
struction of the weapons in exhaustive detail. It’s not surprising, then, that he ap- plied the same attention to detail to his museum- bound mock bomb.
“We tried to duplicate everything we saw on the actual bomb,” Coster- Mullen said. He enlarged photos of the real Little Boy, taken at different an- gles, in order to reproduce the finer points—like the correct bolt position on the nose and the location of the pullout wires on top. “We wanted it to look as if it was just ready to be lifted into the Enola Gay,” he said. Except for the bomb’s antennas, which Coster-Mullen in- cluded on his replica; on the real bomb, the anten- nas weren’t installed until after the bomb was lifted into the B-29. He wanted to match everything, right down to the shade of paint—which is harder than one might imagine, Coster-Mullen said, since there is no record of ex- actly what color the real Little Boy was painted.
(He ended up choosing a very dark green.)
When the replica was ready, Coster-Mullen loaded it into a bright yel- low Penske moving truck with a forklift. As it rest- ed on a specially made stand, he and Jason put on the finishing touches—
lift lugs, safety wires,
pullout wires, electrical plugs, and the antennas.
The mock bomb’s final destination was Wen- dover, but before giving his fake Little Boy to the museum, Coster-Mullen drove it to the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas, for a surprise appearance at a 509th Composite Group reunion.
During World War II, Boeing’s Wichita plant manufactured hundreds of B-29 Stratofortress bombers—the kind that dropped the atomic bombs. Since 2000, vol- unteers at Boeing, in con- junction with the U.S.
Aviation Museum, have been restoring an original B-29 to flying condition.
It was in front of this partly restored bomber, Doc, that many surviving members and widows of the 509th, including Enola Gay crew and one
survivor of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, signed the replica.
But before that could happen, Coster-Mullen had to get his fake bomb past Boeing security.
“They knew we were coming,” Coster-Mullen said. “But here’s this atomic bomb inside our truck, and we were like, gulp! Our contact drove up at the right moment and greased the skids for us to get in.”
When the reunion at- tendees saw the replica,
“Jaws dropped,” Coster- Mullen said. “We were not quite prepared for the response we got.”
Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets signed the replica with a silver permanent marker—in the same place he signed the origi- nal. Coster-Mullen re- counted that upon seeing the bomb, Tibbets said
October 8, 2004: Mike Kuryla, survivor of the Indianapolis sinking, signs “For the boys of the Indianapolis” on the replica.
Jason Coster-Mullen grinds a steel section of the fake bomb in the family garage. The fiberglass nose rests on the 300-pound steel tail section at right.
half-jokingly, “I’ve seen one of these before.”
After the signing and speeches in Wichita, Coster-Mullen handed the truck keys to James Pe- tersen, president of the Wendover Airfield Muse- um. His son, Thomas Pe- tersen, is the museum’s historian, who told me that when he saw the replica he thought first
about “how such a ‘small’
thing so greatly changed the course of human his- tory,” and then chuckled at the possibility of his fa- ther being pulled over while driving the bomb replica to the museum.
The Wendover Airfield Museum will exhibit the Little Boy replica in a limited-access room be- ginning in late 2004 as
part of a special display on the 509th Composite Group. “The bomb repre- sents an important piece of world, national, and Utah history, and we wanted to be able to help the visitors be able to make the connection from this quiet airfield to the rest of the world we live in,” Petersen said.
“[It’s] kind of like being
A
L L THIS TALK ABOUT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONhinging on Ohio and Florida. Didn’t George W.
Bush and John Kerry realize that the outcome of the race depended on something other than ballot returns? Surely Karl Rove knew that it was crucial that Bush win the Weekly Reader presidential poll, that he thin his eyebrows, and root for neither the Boston Red Sox nor the St. Louis Cardinals to play in the World Series—just some of the wacky predictors of presidential futures. Here are some others, and how they fared this election:
Indicator: The candidate with the best-selling Halloween mask will win.
Accuracy: Seven for seven—
every election since 1980.
Election 2004: Bush masks significantly outsold Kerry cos- tumes. The president did hold an unfair advantage—nothing is scarier than the Bush adminis- tration’s foreign policy.
End result: Be ready to hear about a Schwarzenegger mask come Halloween 2008.
Indicator: The candidate’s wife with the most popular cookie recipe, as voted on by Family Circle readers in the magazine’s cookie contest, will be First Lady.
Accuracy: A fairly new indicator, but correct in all three elections since its inception.
Election 2004: In this race, there was a clear, deci- sive winner. Laura Bush’s recipe for oatmeal choco- late chunk cookies proved much more popular than Teresa Heinz Kerry’s pumpkin spice cookies.
End result: Bill Clinton better start searching for a tasty, heart-healthy recipe.
Indicator: The final Washington Redskins home game before the election: If the ’Skins win, the incumbent wins; if they lose, the incumbent loses.
Accuracy: Right on since 1936.
Election 2004: A questionable penalty negated a late Redskins touchdown, which would have put them in the lead, and the Green Bay Packers
won 28–14.
End result: This indicator is on its last legs. Much ballyhooed during the race,
what the media failed to mention was that they altered it. Up until
1996, supposedly every Redskins game before the election—not just a home game—predicted the next president. But in 1996, the Buffalo Bills beat the Redskins in Buffalo, and Clinton tri- umphed over Bob Dole. Look for it to be tweaked again in 2008 so that the media can claim every Red- skins home game not against the Packers indicates the winner.
Indicator: Since the advent of television, the taller candidate will capture the presidency.
Accuracy: Correct until 2000, when a shorter Bush “defeated” a taller Al Gore.
Election 2004: As evidenced in the debates, John Kerry towered over the smaller George Bush.
End result: Bring back Howard Dean? The 2004 outcome renders this indicator useless.
Josh Schollmeyer
able to see the ‘shot heard
’round the world.’”
The Wendover replica is finished, but the
“Waukesha Assembly Fa- cility” may have more bomb-making days ahead—Coster-Mullen says two other sites have contacted him about building Little Boy or Fat Man replicas.
Catherine Auer
Better than exit polls?
CORBIS
CORBIS
H
ERRING NEED NOT SAY“excuse me” after passing wind.
Their flatulence says it for them.
Literally.
Researchers say a fast repetitive tick (given the apt acronym “FRT”) that expels gas from a her- ring’s anal duct area al- lows it to warn other her- ring of impending danger.
“It’s sort of a bonding thing,” biology professor Lawrence Dill of
Canada’s Simon Fraser University told the Guardian. “But then pre-
adolescent boys have been doing this for a millenni- um” (October 5, 2004).
This eccentric research appeals to perhaps only two groups: those with a financial stake in herring and the editors at Annals
of Improbable Research, who award offbeat scien- tific achievements with the equally offbeat Ig Nobel prize. Dill and four other researchers won the 2004 Ig Nobel in biology.
As usual, the Ig Nobel ceremony, held in front of an audience of 1,200 at Harvard’s Sanders The- ater last September, was a zany affair. Audience members filled the air of the auditorium with paper airplanes every time a winner accepted a prize, and genuine Nobel laure- ates Richard Roberts,
William Lipscomb, and Dudley Herschbach treat- ed the crowd to a rousing bout of hula hooping.
Ig Nobel peace prize–
winner Daisuke Inoue of Japan received one of the longest ovations in Ig
It must have worked
Part of the Bush administration’s pre-election play- book included efforts to counter negative war news from Iraq with a good-news campaign (Washington Post, September 30, 2004). First step: Stop distribut- ing reports of the number of daily attacks by insur- gents (that information continued to go to Pentagon contractors and grantees, but not to Congress or the media). Second, set up a speakers’ bureau to deliver good-news accounts at military bases in the United States. Of course, feeding Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi some Bush campaign talking points to use in his speech to Congress probably helped, too.
Water from nothing, or will the desert bloom?
The typical U.S. soldier in the Mesopotamian desert needs three to four gallons of water a day, reports Noah Shachtman (Wired News, September 22). De- livering that much water to an army is a serious drain on resources. So the Defense Advanced Re- search Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded a compa- ny called Sciperio a $4 million contract to begin working on a process to remove moisture from the air. The first step in Sciperio’s system is to pass air over liquid lithium chloride, which quickly traps water as vapor. Unfortunately, the end product is an undrinkable fluid that must be filtered by reverse osmosis—several times—to be potable. Making a fil- tration machine efficient enough to be practical is the challenge. Meanwhile, Schachtman reports that DARPA has awarded a $2.5 million contract to LexCarb, which is working on a way to produce water by adding oxygen to hydrogen from the cooled-down diesel exhaust from the army’s tanks.
From pinecones no less
If American soldiers stay in the Iraqi desert long enough, perhaps they’ll one day benefit from a bio- mimetic product—a new type of smart clothing. On October 4, the British Information Services issued a press release describing a joint research project by the University of Bath and the London College of Fashion. The two co-developed a fabric that mimics the action of pinecones as they open to drop seeds.
The fabric “opens up” when it is hot but shuts out air when it is cold. The material has a top layer of tiny (1/200th of a millimeter-wide) spikes of water- absorbent material combined with a non-porous lower layer.
Party time?
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) doled out the dollars for its employees at a Novem- ber 2003 awards ceremony, spending $500 on
In Brief
Weird science
Toot, toot! An Ig Nobel went to scientists studying herring communication.
Nobel history. It was heartfelt thanks for In- oue’s contribution to world peace: karaoke.
The cheers stopped only so the crowd could sere- nade Inoue with Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”
Touched, Inoue told the crowd, “One time I had a dream to teach people to sing, so I invented karaoke. I didn’t know it would be the start of something big. Now more than ever, I want to teach the world to sing in per- fect harmony.” To ham- mer home his point, he followed his acceptance speech with a karaoke version of the Coca-Cola jingle, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”
Other winning research included a study on the correlation between coun- try music and suicide, an
investigation of the “five- second rule,” and a breakdown of the physics of hula hooping—hence the hula hooping laure- ates. Ig Nobel favorite C. W. Moeliker, a 2003 winner for his study of homosexual necrophilia among male mallards (see January/February 2004 Bulletin), returned to de- liver the night’s off- keynote address.
Fourteen years after their inception, the Ig No- bels are starting to look polished—perhaps too polished for the devoted.
“I thought [the ceremony]
was great,” Roberts told the Guardian. “It would have been better if it had been a little more disorga- nized. It’s starting to ap- pear a bit professional, which is not a good thing.”
Josh Schollmeyer cheese displays, $81,000 on honorary plaques,
$1,500 on three balloon arches, and $5,000 on offi- cial photographs. In total, the bash cost nearly half a million dollars, according to a report by the Depart- ment of Homeland Security’s inspector general (As- sociated Press, October 13).
So bioremediate, already
All kinds of experiments have been conducted to see what plants are best at taking up radioactive conta- mination in the soil near Chernobyl or at sites where nuclear weapons have been tested. The latest such experiment was announced in a Geological Society of America press release on November 5. The pur- pose of the test was to see which plant removed the most depleted uranium (DU) from weapons testing grounds in an exceedingly dry area. A team from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, sponsored by the Defense Department, found that although Indian mustard absorbed DU, Russian this- tle, quinoa, and purple amaranth needed less mois- ture. The best-for-the-purpose plant, Russian thistle, is a tumbleweed, so if its use were to be widely adopted, the plants would have to be harvested be- fore they matured and set out on their famous wind- blown, seed-spreading journeys. (Researchers had good reason to believe they were likely to succeed in their search for plants that absorb uranium: Old- time uranium prospectors used to train Geiger coun- ters on junipers to locate buried uranium lodes.) And substituting for the Joint Strike Fighter . . . The air force is making news with the revelation that it spent $25,000 for a report that urged an additional
$7.5 million be spent on research into telekinesis—
psychic teleportation—the moving of men or objects through sheer concentrated brain power (USA Today, November 5). The Air Force Research Lab’s August “Teleportation Physics Report” concluded that telekinesis is “quite real and can be controlled.”
German uranium? Geranium?
Forget the Manhattan Project and the nascent U.S.
weapons complex, says author Carter Hydrick (Utah’s Daily Herald, November 18). His new book Critical Mass: How Nazi Germany Surrendered En- riched Uranium for the United States’ Atomic Bomb, argues that the real source of fissionable material for the first U.S. atomic weapon was a 1,200-pound load of enriched uranium carried on a German sub- marine headed for Japan. After the U-boat surren- dered to the U.S. Navy in May 1944, says Hydrick, the previously lagging U.S. atomic project was quickly able to fabricate and drop atomic weapons on Japan.
Thank you!
The Bulletin expresses its deep gratitude to the following foundations and family trusts whose generous support in 2004 made possible our continued publication:
Compton Foundation
Kenneth M. Jones Trust/Up the River Endeavors Leighty Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The Ploughshares Fund Prospect Hill Foundation Sisyphus Philanthropic Fund Stewart R. Mott Charitable Trust Samuel Rubin Foundation
bombs, that could travel to Mars and Saturn. The 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, along with design hurdles, squelched this dream, and Taylor took a job at the Defense De- partment. Here, he real- ized his passion for nu- clear weaponry had been greatly misguided.
“I became privy to the actual characteristics and deployments of what, by then, were thousands of nuclear weapons,” he re- called in the Bulletin.
“And I discovered willful deception at all levels of government concerning the effects of nuclear weapons on peo- ple, on buildings, on mili-
tary equipment, on everything.”
Taylor dedicated the re- mainder of his life to has- tening arms control and denouncing all things nu- clear. He railed against nuclear energy, advocated alternative energy, and served on the president’s commission on the Three Mile Island accident. Al- though this work did not satisfy his scientific cu- riosities, he regarded it as his most important contri- bution to the atomic age.
“The work of disarma- ment is not as intellectual- ly compelling, perhaps,”
Taylor wrote in the Bul- letin. “But the rewards are far greater.”
T
HEODOREfather of the miniatureTAYLOR, THE atomic bomb and a self- professed “nuclear dropout,” died on Octo- ber 28, 2004 of heart dis- ease. He was 79.Taylor’s unique role in the arms race began at Los Alamos in 1949.
While others at Los Alam- os busied themselves with
the hydrogen bomb, Tay- lor sought to shrink the atom bomb without sacri- ficing any of its force. He attacked his task with zeal and unwavering focus, de- signing one miniature weapon after another.
(Each shared a comic- book villain name—
“Scorpion,” “Wasp,”
“Bee,” “Viper,” “Cobra,”
“Zombie,” and “Hor- net.”) His efforts culmi- nated in the development of the smallest fission bomb of the era, the
“Davy Crockett,” which weighed 51 pounds and nearly fit into a suitcase.
The work consumed him, and Taylor ignored all else—including the birth of his second daugh- ter. “Instead of being with my wife, Caro, I had spent the day at a military intelligence office, poring over aerial photographs of Moscow, placing the sharp point of a compass in Red Square, and draw-
ing circles corre- sponding to dis- tances at which moderate and se- vere damage would result from the ex- plosion at different heights of a 500- kiloton made-in- America bomb,” he revealed in a 1996 Bulletin article. “I remember feeling disappointed be- cause none of the circles included all of Moscow.”
Long after Taylor swore off weapons work, he visited Red Square. Remember- ing that he once schemed to annihilate it, emotion overcame him. “I cried,”
he wrote. “Yes, my work at Los Alamos had been so intellectually stimulat- ing, so compelling, but so insane.”
After adding the mas- sive Super Oralloy Bomb (commonly referred to as the SOB because of its gi- gantic yield) to his nu- clear legacy, Taylor left Los Alamos in 1956 to spearhead Project Orion.
He envisioned building a 16-story spacecraft, pro- pelled by 2,000 nuclear
Theodore Taylor
Ted Taylor in 1986.
ROBERT DEL TREDICI