He died earlier today at his home in Columbus, Ohio. Tibbets suffered small strokes and heart failure in recent years and had been in hospice care
The Air Corps colonel in the cockpit of "Enola Gay" led the mission on Aug. 6, 1945, killing at least 70,000 people instantly and demolishing almost two-thirds of the Japanese city. The uranium device was the culmination of more than $2 billion of research in the race to beat Nazi Germany to develop atomic weapons. Japan surrendered a day after a plutonium bomb destroyed Nagasaki on Aug. 9.
He was one of four crew members that became part of the top-secret Manhattan Project, the team led by physicist Robert Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop the atom bomb. Only Tibbets, 29 at the time, was informed of the bomb type before the mission.
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