Editing Little Boy (section)

==Naming the bomb==
There are two primary accounts of how the first atomic bombs got their names. [[Project Y|Los Alamos Laboratory]] and [[Project Alberta]] physicist [[Robert Serber]] stated, many decades after the fact, that he had named the first two [[atomic bomb]] designs during [[World War II]] based on their shapes: [[Thin Man (nuclear bomb)|Thin Man]] and [[Fat Man]]. The "Thin Man" was a long, thin device, and its name came from the [[Dashiell Hammett]] detective novel and [[The Thin Man (film)|series of movies]] about ''[[The Thin Man]]''. The "Fat Man" was round and fat so it was named after Kasper Gutman, a rotund character in Hammett's 1930 novel [[The Maltese Falcon (novel)|''The Maltese Falcon'']], played by [[Sydney Greenstreet]] in the 1941 [[The Maltese Falcon (1941 film)|film version]]. Little Boy was named by others as an allusion to Thin Man since it was based on its design.{{sfn|Serber|Crease|1998|p=104}}{{sfn|Rhodes|1986|p=541}} It was also sometimes referred to as the "Mark I" nuclear bomb design, with "Mark II" referring to the abandoned Thin Man, and "Mark III" to the "Fat Man."<ref>The "Mark" nomenclature did not become standardized until the postwar period. Some wartime documents refer to "Mark I" and "Mark II" as different gun-type weapons, or "Mark II" and "Mark III" as referring to non-lens implosion concepts that were pursued until the spring of 1945 (with "Mark IV" being the lensed Fat Man design). Eventually the "Mark I" was used exclusively for Little Boy, and "Mark III" for Fat Man. See e.g., {{harvnb|Hewlett|Anderson|1962|pp=251–252}}, {{harvnb|Hansen|1995a|p=65}}, and discussion of nonlens program in {{harvnb|Hoddeson|Henriksen|Meade|Westfall|1993|pp=300, 312}}</ref>

In September 1945, another Project Alberta physicist, [[Norman F. Ramsey]], stated in his brief "History of Project A," that the early bomb ballistic test shapes designs were referred to as "Thin Man" and "Fat Man" by (unspecified) "[[United States Air Force|Air Force]] representatives" for "security reasons," so that their communications over telephones sounded "as if they were modifying a plane to carry [[Franklin Delano Roosevelt|Roosevelt]] (the Thin Man) and [[Winston Churchill|Churchill]] (the Fat Man)," as opposed to modifying the [[B-29]]s to carry the two atomic bomb shapes as part of Project [[Silverplate]] in late 1943.{{sfn|Hoddeson|Henriksen|Meade|Westfall|1993|p=419}}<ref>{{cite book |last=Ramsey |first=N. F. |author-link=Norman F. Ramsey |contribution=History of Project A |editor-last=Coster-Mullen |editor-first=John |title=Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man |location=United States |publisher=J. Coster-Mullen |year=2012 |oclc=298514167 }}</ref>

Another explanation of the names, from a classified United States Air Force history of Project Silverplate from the 1950s, implies a possible reconciliation of the two versions: that the terms "Thin Man" and "Fat Man" were first developed by someone at or from Los Alamos (i.e., Serber), but were consciously adopted by the officers in Silverplate when they were adopting their own codenames for their own project (including "Silverplate"). As Silverplate involved modifying B-29s for a secret purpose, deliberately using codenames that would align with modifying vehicles for Roosevelt and Churchill would serve their needs well.<ref>{{cite book|last=Bowen|first=Lee|title=A History of the Air Force Atomic Energy Program, 1943–1953, Volume I (Project Silverplate, 1943–1946)|publisher=United States Air Force Historical Division|date=1959|page=96}}</ref>