In the late 1950s, one of the most consequential artifacts of the twentieth century sat rusting on an overgrown stretch of tarmac in Maryland, with birds nesting in its engine cowlings and souvenir hunters unbolting pieces to take home. This episode traces the life cycle of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, from the Silverplate specification that stripped its armor and gun turrets and added fuel-injected engines, reversible-pitch propellers, and pneumatic bomb bay doors, to Colonel Paul Tibbets personally selecting it on the assembly line in Bellevue, Nebraska, in May 1945 and naming it for his mother the day before the mission.

The episode follows the Hiroshima mission in detail: the uranium projectile welded to the floor of the captain’s quarters aboard the USS Indianapolis, the bomb armed in flight to avoid vaporizing Tinian in a takeoff crash, the 53-second fall from over 31,000 feet, the 15-kiloton blast that killed 70,000 to 80,000 people, and why a weapon that fissioned only 1.7 percent of its uranium still leveled a city. It then follows the aircraft’s strange afterlife as a weather plane on the Nagasaki mission, decades dismantled in storage, a 300,000-hour restoration, the cancelled 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, and the fierce debate over whether a museum can display a weapon of mass destruction neutrally.

• Why Silverplate bombers were built for survival through speed and altitude rather than firepower
• The tension between Tibbets and Captain Robert Lewis over the name painted under the pilot’s window
• How the Enola Gay’s clear-skies report over Kokura preceded Bockscar’s diversion to Nagasaki
• Veterans’ groups, the American Legion, and the resignation of museum director Martin Harwit
• The minimalist placard at the Udvar-Hazy Center and the counter-petition from historians and writers