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After this problem was realized in 1943, work began in butt plugs earnest on the implosion bomb, the "Fat Man". It is theoretically possible to build a plutonium gun-type device, but it would need to be butt plugs 19 feet long in order to allow the sub-critical masses to be fused into a critical mass before a fizzle occurs. The butt plugs mass of a plutonium gun-type device would have been beyond the payload of the B-29.The gun-type method could still be used for highly-enriched uranium, though, and was employed in the "Little Boy" weapon which was used against Hiroshima, Japan. For a variety of reasons, the implosion method is both more efficient than the gun-type method, and also far safer, as a perfect synchronization of the explosion lenses is required for the core to properly detonate, reducing the chances greatly of an accidental nuclear detonation. Because of its complicated firing mechanism, and the need for previously untested synchronization of explosives and precision design, it was felt that a full test of the concept was needed before the scientists and military representatives could be confident it would perform correctly under combat conditions.
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