Tibbets Quotes & Sayings

Rather than sleep, Tibbets crawled through the thirty-foot tunnel to chat
with the waist crew, wondering if they knew what they were carrying. "A
chemist's nightmare," the tail gunner, Robert Caron, guessed, then "a
physicist's nightmare." "Not exactly," Tibbets hedged. Tibbets was leaving
by the time Caron put two and two together:
'Tibbets stayed a little longer, and then started to crawl forward up the tunnel. I remembered something else, and just as the last of the Old Man was disappearing, I sort of tugged at his foot, which was still showing. He came sliding back in a hurry, thinking maybe
something was wrong. "What's the matter?"
I looked at him and said, "Colonel, are we splitting atoms today?"
This time he gave me a really funny look, and said, "That's about it. — Richard Rhodes

A bright light filled the plane. The first shock-wave hit us. We were eleven and a half miles slant range from the atomic explosion but the whole airplane cracked and crinkled from the blast ... We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud ... mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall. — Paul Tibbets

I will go only so far as to say that I knew what an atom was. — Paul Tibbets

The beauty of my passion had been crushed under the weight of my horrific past. — Anne Tibbets

I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it, and have it work as perfectly as it did ... I sleep clearly every night. — Paul Tibbets