Five Fateful Hours

The eleven crewmen of the 6-29 Enola Gay stood silently in the early-morning darkness, eyes fixed on a solemn, balding Navy captain with a staggering burden: two cans filled with 137.3 Ibs. of uranium 235. At 0245 hours on Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay lifted heavily from the long runway at Tinian. Within minutes. Captain William Sterling Parsons climbed into the stuffy bomb bay. Thus began five fateful hours in Liman history.

"Deke" Parsons special care during those five hours was a mechanical marvel nicknamed "Little Boy." A vaguely cylindrical device, it measured 129 in. long, 31 1/2 in. in diameter, weighed 9,700 Ibs. Four antennas bristled from its tail; its tungsten-steel nose glistened; on its grey flanks were scrawled obscene greetings to Emperor Hirohito.

The Enola Gay bore northeast while Navyman Parsons worked, now straddling Little Boy, now lying on his back, now wriggling on his belly. He checked and closed Little Boy's complex circuits, tested the barometric switches. At 0330 the Enola Gay passed beyond Tinian's radio range.

Deke Parsons kept working. A top naval ordnance expert who had been with the Manhattan Project almost from its start, he sent current through Little Boy's test leads, watched calmly for the green monitor lights that told him Little Boy's mighty power was still in check. Fewer than 5 ft. of hollow shaft separated Little

Boy's two uranium masses. One mistake could have vaporized Deke Parsons, the eleven crewmen and the Enola Gay.

At 0730, after Parsons had cut the umbilical cord linking Little Boy and the Enola Gay, the bomb was "final"--a mighty instrument of war. Four minutes from the unsuspecting target city, Parsons threw the toggle switch that put Little Boy on its own battery power. At 0915 on that sunny August morning, Little Boy fell free, tail ticking. Four clocks, four barometric switches, four radar rigs inside Little Boy measured the fall. After 15 long seconds, Little Boy began listening for the faint echoes of its own radar signals to earth. On the igth echo--800 ft. above the rooftops of Hiroshima--a powder charge sent one uranium mass bullet-ing through a hollow shaft into the other mass. In one fifteen-hundredth of a microsecond, fission began. In that dreadful instant a city died, and 70,000 of its inhabitants.

In the remaining years of his life, Navyman Parsons had little to say of his fateful five hours. The years were few. One December night in 1953 Rear Admiral Parsons waked with sharp chest pain. He slipped silently downstairs in his Washington home, picked out to read Volume XI of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, methodically turned to the section marked Heart, Diseases of the. It was too late for Deke Parsons (52); he collapsed and died next day.

This week, almost unnoticed against the splashy baptism of the nuclear-powered submarine named after a Greek god, the Navy prepared to launch a slim, 3,990-ton destroyer at the Ingalls Shipbuilding Yard in Pascagoula, Miss. The destroyer's name: Parsons, after the man who armed the first atom bomb dropped in war.

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