I’m surprised the bomb was intended to go off on the ground rather than an airburst like in Japan. Would that be to have maximum impact on hardened targets?
Somehow, I can’t get overly excited at Felix Leiter falling out of his shirt…
Amd it was M not Felix that disarmed the bomb.
I happened to do quite the wiki crawl on that sort of thing, but regarding explosive bombs in WWII rather than atomics. The Brits and the Americans seemed to take different approaches to very heavy bombs.
The Brits favored bombs with very heavy casing designed to dive into the ground before detonating, causing earthquakes to damage the foundations of buildings. Meanwhile, the Americans had bombs with a higher proportion of high explosives and proximity fuses to set them off a certain altitude above the ground, attempting to flatten their targets from above instead (it’s not a coincidence that these bombs were designed with similar proportions to the Fat Boy, which I think had a similar mission profile).
And in response to Leo Bloom, no, I don’t chuck bombs, I fly a desk and work radios and spreadsheets. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
I’ve honestly long been curious if there were any air campaigns that used both ground penetrating bombs and air-burst bombs in concert. I can only imagine the sort of carnage you’d accomplish with that one-two punch.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I must say an unfortunate use of language.