More than 45,000 people were killed in the initial blast. Fat Man was the name given to the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. “There would be people who would disagree that the development of the bomb was a good thing for the state or the nation,” said Jim Walther, director of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque. Other byproducts of the nuclear industry in the state include radioactive fallout from the July 1945 test at Trinity Site, an accidental uranium mill spill that released radioactive material into the Puerco River at Church Rock in July 1979, an airborne release of radioactive material at WIPP in 2014 and, as recently as last month, the potential exposure of 15 employees to plutonium-238 at LANL. Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque were spawned by the bomb, as was uranium mining in the state and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a radioactive waste repository near Carlsbad. “The investment of federal monies in the labs was a huge factor in the development of New Mexico.” “It had a huge impact on the state,” said Luis Campos, professor of the history of science at the University of New Mexico. “With nuclear weapons, we now have the possibility of ending human history, the threat of mutual assured destruction.” “Maybe another 60,000 to 70,000 people died within several months afterwards from radiation,” said history professor Jon Hunner, now retired from New Mexico State University. 6, 1945, Little Boy dropped from the Enola Gay, exploded at 1,800 feet above Hiroshima and immediately killed 70,000 to 80,000 people, 30% of the city’s population, mostly civilians, and wiped out 4.7 square miles. He sidled his way up to a 10-foot-long atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy and armed it.Īt 8:15 a.m. Now, three weeks after the test explosion at Trinity, Parsons was aboard another B-29. He was associate director at Los Alamos during the development of nuclear weapons there, and he had observed, from the vantage point of an airborne B-29, the detonation of the first atomic bomb at New Mexico’s Trinity Site on July 16, 1945. Parsons’ military specialty was ordnance (weapons). (Courtesy of National Museum of Nuclear Science and History) William Sterling “Deak” Parsons of Fort Sumner armed the atomic bomb Little Boy while airborne in the B-29 Enola Gay en route to Hiroshima, Japan. Naval Academy, from which he graduated in 1922. An exceptional student, he spoke Spanish fluently, finished at Fort Sumner High in 1918 and was accepted into the U.S. Parsons, 43 at the time and the weaponeer on the Enola Gay, grew up in Fort Sumner.