Building the Bomb

I’ve never been able to find a decent game piece to satisfactorily represent the atom bomb for Axis & Allies. I know I’ve always thought it should look like “Fat Man.” Unlike Little Boy, Fat Man had a very distinct shape. It was also painted yellow so it could be tracked easier when falling from the plane. I thought this would also make it show up easily on the map, since yellow is the most visible color in the spectrum.

Fat Man was actually the second bomb dropped on Japan. The first atomic bomb to be detonated was the Gadget, in the Trinity nuclear test, less than a month earlier at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. This bomb was identical in most respects to the Fat Man used at Nagasaki. Here is a picture of what Fat Man looked like:

I recently purchased a 1:48 scale B-29 Superfortress model kit on Ebay. My intent here was to build it and hang it over our game table in the game room - at 1:48 scale this plane will have almost a 36" wingspan. Anyway, I was looking inside the kit - it came with both Fat Man and Little boy bombs, and a dozen smaller bombs. I knew I wasn’t going to use the smaller bombs for the model. What if they could be made into Fat Man bombs? The picture here on the model kit box shows the smaller bombs:

My first problem was the general shape of the bombs - they were too long compared to Fat Man:

My solution was to get a special miniature saw and miter box made for cutting polystyrene. I cut about 1/2 inch out of the middle of each bomb and glued the ends back together, resulting in this overall shape:

The fins were also too long so I cut them back. I then trimmed the propellers off the nose of each bomb as Fat Man did not have this. The next problem was the fins themselves. Fat Man weighed 10,300 Lbs. During testing, high-speed photographs revealed that standard tail fins folded under the pressure, resulting in an erratic descent. Various combinations of stabilizer boxes and fins were tested on the Fat Man shape to eliminate its persistent wobble until an arrangement dubbed a “California Parachute”, a cubical tail box with fins angled at 45° to the line of fall, was approved. I felt that this unusual “boxed in” fin shape had to be duplicated. I purchased some flat styrene sheets from a local hobby shop. These were made of the same material as the model, so the glue bonded well. I cut the 0.5 mm sheeting into thin strips and glued them fin to fin, making the familiar boxed shape:

After sanding and trimming, I primed the bombs with white Krylon Fusion primer. Next came 2 coats of yellow paint with spray gloss enamel:

Now for the black areas. The black on the bomb was actually protective paint or sealer that was sprayed on in order to protect the sensitive parts inside the bomb from moisture in the air. Here is a picture of someone spraying on the red sealer. The black must have been used over the red to further protect it.

As it looks like this black paint was applied freehand, I didn’t feel too bad abount painting the black freehand on my bombs. That was the only way I could think of to come close to the actual markings. The circle on top of the bombs was made by using the inside of a metal washer as a template. I used partly a detail brush and partly a black sharpie marker. After two dips in future floor finish to make a durable clear coating, they turned out like this:

Here’s what it the finished bomb looks like on the map. The Americans have taken Okinawa and the B-29 “Bockscar,” named after its pilot, Captain Frederick Bock, is on the runway. Fat Man is being prepped for its deadly mission. Japan will soon experience a weapon unlike any other in the history of warfare. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” Robert Oppenheimer once quoted from a Hindu holy book.

• Historical information for this post is from Wikipedia.