New Mexico and The Bomb

Parsons

Ollie Reed, Jr.

At 7:30 on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, Navy Capt. William Sterling “Deak” Parsons squeezed his way into the dark bomb bay of a B-29 Superfortress named the Enola Gay. Parsons, 43 at the time and the weaponeer on the Enola Gay, grew up in Fort Sumner. An exceptional student, he spoke Spanish fluently, finished at Fort Sumner High in 1918 and was accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy, from which he graduated in 1922. Parsons’ military specialty was ordnance (weapons). 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. Now, three weeks after the test explosion at Trinity, Parsons was aboard another B-29. He sidled his way up to a 10-foot-long atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy and armed it. At 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 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. “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. “With nuclear weapons, we now have the possibility of ending human history, the threat of mutual assured destruction.” A second atomic bomb, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945. It killed more than 45,000 people on detonation. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945, ending World War II. Both Little Boy and Fat Man had been designed and built at Los Alamos, as had the Gadget, a plutonium bomb tested at Trinity Site, a portion of the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, 30 miles southeast of Socorro. All this was part of the Manhattan Project, the United States’ effort to create an atomic bomb for use in World War II. New Mexico was vital to the building of the bomb, but the bomb proved as essential to the building of New Mexico...MORE