Peace and War: Reminiscences of a life on the frontiers of science - Robert Serber
Robert Serber - Peace and War: Reminiscences of a life on the frontiers of science, p.104.
At our camp two Quonset huts served as our laboratories where the bombs were to be assembled. One was for Fat Man, the other for Little Boy. At Los Alamos I had given the bombs names descriptive of their shapes, the gun assembly was the Thin Man, taken from the title of the Dashiell Hammett detective novel, which had recently been made into the William Powell-Myrna Loy movie. The name the Fat Man for the implosion bomb then followed naturally, after Sidney Greenstreet's role in The Maltese Falcon. The original Thin Man bomb, designed to contain the high-velocity gun intended for plutonium assembly, was so long it filled two bomb bays of a B-29. In drop tests the Air Force ran into trouble getting the two hooks to release simultaneously and was relieved when a much shorter, one bomb bay version was substituted, sufficient for the low-velocity uranium assembly gun. They named the new version Little Boy, by comparison with Thin Man.
At our camp two Quonset huts served as our laboratories where the bombs were to be assembled. One was for Fat Man, the other for Little Boy. At Los Alamos I had given the bombs names descriptive of their shapes, the gun assembly was the Thin Man, taken from the title of the Dashiell Hammett detective novel, which had recently been made into the William Powell-Myrna Loy movie. The name the Fat Man for the implosion bomb then followed naturally, after Sidney Greenstreet's role in The Maltese Falcon. The original Thin Man bomb, designed to contain the high-velocity gun intended for plutonium assembly, was so long it filled two bomb bays of a B-29. In drop tests the Air Force ran into trouble getting the two hooks to release simultaneously and was relieved when a much shorter, one bomb bay version was substituted, sufficient for the low-velocity uranium assembly gun. They named the new version Little Boy, by comparison with Thin Man.