The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

A Boeing product, the B-29 was a revolutionary aircraft, the first intercontinental bomber. It was conceived in the late 1930s by ambitious officers within what was then still the Army Air Corps as the vehicle of their vision of wars fought at great distance by strategic air power. As early as September 1939 they proposed its use from bases in the Philippines, Siberia or the Aleutians in the event of war against Japan.2184 It was the world’s first pressurized bomber and at 70,000 pounds the heaviest production bomber ever built, 135,000 pounds loaded, a weight that required an 8,000-foot runway to lumber airborne. In appearance it was a sleek, polished-aluminum tube 99 feet long intersected by huge 141-foot wings—two B-29’s would fill a football field—with a classic sinusoidal tail nearly three stories tall. Four Wright 18-cylinder radial engines that each developed 2,200 horsepower propelled it at altitude at 350 miles per hour maximum speed—it cruised at 220—and it was designed to fly a 4,000-mile mission with up to 20,000 pounds of bombs, though 12,000 pounds was nearer its operational load.