Enola Gay Under Tarp

@benjiboy maybe if there was 100% cloud cover, given navigational accuracy back then (absent GPS) they couldn't be sure they were dropping it over the city itself vice a barren hillside.

Sorry for coming late to the party. Love this photo of the Enola Gay and the one of the Concorde. There was a question in this thread regarding the use of the Norden bomb site in the deployment of a nuclear bomb. Why did the US feel it had to be so accurate in dropping it's nuclear bombs if they were air burst devices of huge destructive power? I believe the answer is that the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of WWII were largely untested weapons, and the US military wanted to calibrate their destructive power and explosive yield. To do that they needed to know as precisely as possible where the bomb was detonated over the city to measure how severe the damage was a different distances from ground zero. For Hiroshima, the target was the Aioi Bridge (相生橋, aioi bashi), an unusual "T"-shaped three-way bridge that could be easily distinguished from a relatively high altitude.