Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
No, it’s not a joke.
A rare wartime relic linked to the dawn of the nuclear age is heading to auction, offering collectors an unsettling glimpse into the machinery behind one of history’s darkest moments.
The piece, a restored 1945 ground-training version of the “Little Boy” bomb, will be sold by Heritage Auctions in Dallas with bidding beginning at $25,000.
First nuclear chapter
According to the Heritage Auctions website, the non-operational device was originally built for the U.S. Army Air Forces to familiarise flight and ordnance crews with the bomb’s size and handling before deployment.
The mock-up mirrors the dimensions of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, which means it roughly 3 meters (10 feet) long and 71 cm (28 inches) in diameter.
According to the auction house, the training model has been restored to museum standards, returning it to its wartime black-and-white finish.
Manhattan Project legacy
The real Mk I “Little Boy” was released from the B-29 Enola Gay, now displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
It detonated about 1,800 feet above Hiroshima after being assembled under the Manhattan Project, the secret U.S. programme launched in 1942 to develop atomic weapons.
That attack produced a blast equivalent to roughly 15 kilotons of TNT, killing tens of thousands of people and levelling large swathes of the city. U.S. forces later said the strike accelerated the end of the Second World War.
The original device weighed around 9,000 pounds and used a gun-type design that forced one mass of uranium into another to trigger a nuclear chain reaction.
While fully functional in 1945, the surviving example has since been demilitarised; the U.S. Department of Energy refurbished it in 2004 at Sandia National Laboratories.
Sources: SWNS, Heritage Auctions, The Sun
