Wendover Air Force Base

The men who carried out the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki learned the job here, in the Utah desert. Paul Tibbets picked the spot himself, over Great Bend in Kansas and Mountain Home in Idaho. He wanted somewhere remote enough to keep a secret, but close enough to fly to Los Alamos. The base was given the code name Kingman. On the Manhattan Project's own maps it was Site K. Crews built prototype bombs here with no nuclear material inside them and dropped them to see how they fell. Nobody knew how the shapes would behave in the air, or whether the fuses would work. In June alone they made twenty-four test drops. In July, thirty. Every bombardier dropped at least fifty inert practice bombs before Tibbets would call the group ready. The firing unit for the Fat Man bomb was finally tested successfully at Wendover on the fourth of August, nineteen forty-five. Two days later Hiroshima was gone.