Tibbets assigned Lewis to try out the new bomber on what was by now a regular milk run from Wendover to the Salton Sea. Ferebee was on board partly because this time they were to drop one of the precious “fuzed units.” These were dummy bombs the exact shape of the atomic bomb and containing the proximity-fuze firing mechanism. Each of these mechanisms cost the equivalent of a Cadillac.
In addition to the engineer, there was another new face on board, Second Lieutenant Morris R. Jeppson of the First Ordnance Squadron. In the roomy cabin he shared with the navigator and radioman, Jeppson had rigged up a control panel to monitor the bomb’s complex internal electronics before it was dropped from the plane.
A religious and reserved young man, Jeppson quietly went about his work, oblivious of all the banter around him. He knew the fliers were curious about his presence, and he sensed they were eager to pump him about the First Ordnance. But he admired the way they restrained themselves. He liked that sort of discipline.
Jeppson was a physics graduate who while in the service had studied at Yale and Harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His talents were noticed, and he was assigned to the First Ordnance.
He took an immediate liking to Lewis. The pilot was friendly, suggesting where he could store his equipment and telling him what he should expect on the flight. So far, it had been uneventful. The feedback from the cables running from his control panel to the bomb revealed that the weapon was “acting normally.”
“Two minutes to AP.”
Lewis acknowledged Ferebee’s words. He prepared to slam shut the bomb-bay doors the moment the bombardier announced the blockbuster was on its way down.
The engineer had a duplicate of the bombsight Ferebee crouched over. If the bombardier’s instrument malfunctioned, the bomb could still be dropped by Ferebee’s ordering the engineer to pull a lever.
For his own purposes, the engineer synchronized his movements with every adjustment Ferebee was making.
“One and a half minutes to AP.”
Suddenly the B-29 leaped higher into the air.
“Je—sus!”
Ferebee’s strangled cry was followed closely by another from Lewis. “You’ve dropped the bomb too soon!”
Ferebee corrected him. “I didn’t. That engineer must have done it.”
Lewis yelled at the engineer over the intercom. “Did you touch anything?”
“I thought we were at the drop point!”
Ferebee’s next words stopped Lewis’s flow of invective. “It’s falling straight into the town!”
He watched, transfixed, as the bomb plummeted earthward. Though it contained only a small amount of explosive, with its ballast and electronic equipment the blockbuster weighed over nine thousand pounds; it could do considerable damage.
“Bob, hold her steady.”
Lewis held his original heading.
Jeppson calculated that the bomb needed about a minute to reach the ground.
Thirty seconds passed.
Then Ferebee spoke. “It’s going to miss.”
The bomb fell half a mile beyond Calipatria.
Within hours, Manhattan Project agents had sealed off the area and were searching for the unit. It had buried itself ten feet underground. It was recovered, and bulldozers filled in the hole. No one in Calipatria knew how close the town had been to being hit.
The flight back to Wendover was a tense one. The wretched engineer’s attempts to apologize met with icy silence.
At Wendover he was bundled into a car and driven to Salt Lake City. There he was put on a train by project agents and told he would never again be allowed near the air base.
Tibbets glanced in angry disbelief at one of his most trusted officers, a short, trimly built lieutenant colonel. Uanna, seated beside Tibbets, continued to question the officer. “You admit you took a B-twenty-nine without authority to fly home on a weekend pass?”
The officer maintained his aggressive pose. “I have the authority to take a plane.”
Uanna’s reproof was mild. “Nobody in the entire air force has the authority to take our most top-secret bomber for pleasure purposes.”
Tibbets took over. “You took the plane and left it unguarded for two whole days on a civilian airfield?”
“Yes. But the plane was locked.”
“And then you gave your father a conducted tour of an airplane that few servicemen on this base are allowed to go near?”
“My father’s interested in flying. I didn’t think there was any harm.”
Tibbets exploded. “I don’t want to hear about your father’s interests! And it seems to me that you have never been able to think!”
“Colonel, I’m prepared to apologize—”
“Apologize! You think that settles matters? You’ve broken every goddam security rule. And you call yourself an officer! I’m going to make an example of you!”
The officer waited uneasily.
His decision made, Tibbets wasted no time in delivering sentence. “You’ve got just sixty minutes to pack. A plane will be waiting for you. Its destination is Alaska. You’re going to spend the rest of your war talking to penguins!”
“Colonel—”
“Another word and I’ll have you court-martialed. Now, get out!”
The disgraced officer left.
This was the third case of the week in which security regulations had been breached. Two days earlier, on March 20, a couple of lieutenants on duty at the telemetering station at the Salton Sea bombing range had left their highly secret ballistic-measuring equipment and driven across the border into Mexico “for a little fun.” They, too, had been swiftly sent to Alaska.
Privately, Tibbets sympathized with the three officers, but even if he had wanted to, he could not have shown them compassion. That might have opened a floodgate, and the carefully wrought security protection he and Uanna had built up could have been swept away.
Tibbets knew his actions did not make him popular. But as he had once told van Kirk, he wasn’t “trying to win a goddam beauty contest.”
Transferring a senior and two junior officers to the icy wilds of Alaska would be a deterrent. But it would not alleviate the tensions. For six months, Tibbets had driven his men at a relentless pace. And, until a few days ago, Tibbets himself had not been that familiar with “the object of all this slave driving,” the top-secret nuclear mechanism inside the bomb. Then, Parsons had flown to Wendover with schematic drawings of the uranium bomb in order to discuss with Tibbets a new series of fuzing tests. Tibbets already knew the bomb would be about ten feet long, twenty-eight inches in diameter, and weigh something over nine thousand pounds, but what he learned from Parsons caused him to be “amazed by the sweet simplicity of the thing.”
The bomb’s uranium core would weigh only about twenty-two pounds, split into two unequal segments kept six feet apart inside the barrel of a cannon, which was itself inside the bomb’s casing. Between the two pieces of uranium 235 was a “tamper,” a neutron-resistant shield made from a high-density alloy. The tamper was to stop the two pieces of uranium from reacting with each other—to help prevent premature “crit”—which would cause an unscheduled nuclear explosion.
The smaller piece of uranium 235 would weigh five pounds. This was the atomic “bullet” which, when the gun was activated by the proximity-fuzing system, would be fired down the gun barrel at the “target,” the larger piece of uranium 235 fixed to the muzzle of the cannon just a few feet away. The “target” would weigh about seventeen pounds.
When fired, the force of the uranium “bullet” would make it sever the pins previously holding it in place, break through the tamper, and ram it into the “target”—causing the nuclear explosion.