J.B. Hunt driver’s book about the first atomic weapons speeds into the public imagination

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One night this past winter, Waukesha, Wis.-based J.B. Hunt driver John Coster-Mullen was heading toward the exit door at a Pilot truckstop when something above a large, locked merchandise display cabinet caught his eye. “There were several flat-screen TVs running the Weather Channel,” he says. Going about his business, his attention was nonetheless piqued by the name Paul Tibbets, spoken by the narrator of what turned out to be an installment of a Weather Channel series on infamous moments “When Weather Changed History,” as goes the series title. Tibbets was the Air Force pilot (later brigadier general) who piloted the Enola Gay over Hiroshima to deliver the first atomic weapon ever used in combat.

Coster-Mullen’s eyes then snapped back to the TVs, where he recognized the program – about the atomic Trinity test, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were all impacted by particularities of weather – but not just because it had been running all week in scheduled repeats. He was in it. The J.B. Hunt million-miler and honorary member of the 509th Composite Group, the combat unit of the Army Air Force tasked with that first atomic delivery, is today likewise recognized as the foremost scholar on the design of the historic Little Boy and Fat Man bombs, as they were known, and among foremost historians on the Nagasaki mission.

“Ten seconds later,” Coster-Mullen says, “there I am on the TV.” The “really odd feeling” he got watching himself there in that most pedestrian of places, at a fuel stop on his dedicated run between Wisconsin and Chicago, came in the wake of perhaps even higher-profile attention he and his book received when journalist David Samuels published a lengthy feature on him in the New Yorker last December (see “Beginning With a Bang,” p. 48).

The culmination of upwards of 15 years of research is Coster-Mullen’s Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man. It’s “top secret” because, though the 12-year Hunt driver had decades of scholarship to draw upon in addition to his own expertise in photographic analysis (as well as extensive time spent with surviving members of the combat mission), most engineering information about the original bombs is officially classified to this day. Among his readers are government physicists, combat veterans and historians. “The people in the government at the highest levels are fully aware of my book,” Coster-Mullen says.

When he was on his cross-country trip with Samuels to visit his actual-size replica of the Little Boy bomb at the Wendover Air Field museum in Utah, Samuels was just off work on an Atlantic Monthly story about then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whom Samuels had told about Coster-Mullen. When Rice learned of Samuels’ next story, about a truck driver who’d written the definitive account of the engineering specifics behind the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs, “[Samuels] said her face kind of brightened,” Coster-Mullen told me. “And she said, ‘Oh – my – God.’”