Bomb (21 page)

“Oppenheimer was really terribly worried,” remembered the chemist Donald Hornig. “He thought someone had better babysit it right up until the moment it was fired.”

The twenty-five-year-old Hornig got the job. He grabbed a book and climbed the tower. On the platform beside the bomb was a folding chair. A single 60-watt bulb hung from the roof of the open metal shack. There was a telephone, in case of trouble.

“By then there was a violent thunder and lightning storm,” said Hornig. “The possibility of lightning striking the tower was very much on my mind.”

He calmed himself with the knowledge that if lighting struck, the tower's steel frame would most likely conduct the electricity harmlessly into the ground. Or, perhaps, the electrical burst would set off the bomb.

“And in that case, I'd never know about it,” he said. “So I read my book.”

*   *   *

G
ENERAL
G
ROVES ARRIVED
at the Trinity site later that night, got out of his car, and looked angrily at the sky. Rain was falling, wind whipping, lightning flashing.

He found Oppenheimer, and they discussed the weather. It was a serious problem. They needed clear skies to get a good look at the explosion, but far more worrisome was the danger of spreading radioactive fallout. When the uranium atoms in the bomb split, some would break down into other radioactive elements—atoms that would continue shooting out particles. If the wind blew this deadly fallout into rain clouds, it could literally rain down on nearby towns. Without a break in the wind and rain, the test could not go forward.

Groves and Oppenheimer agreed to meet again at one in the morning to assess the situation.

“Get some sleep,” said Groves. Then he found a cot and shut his eyes.

Oppenheimer walked to the mess tent. He sat on a bench, drinking coffee and smoking, reading poetry and listening to rain pound the canvas roof.

TEST SHOT

THAT NIGHT, AT LOS ALAMOS,
Klaus Fuchs splashed down a muddy path to the road where three busses were waiting. He climbed onto one and found a seat in the back. Richard Feynman walked back and sat next to Fuchs. All three buses drove down the hill and through the dark, starless night.

“There were about ninety of us in that strange caravan, traveling silently in the utmost secrecy,” said William Laurence, a
New York Times
reporter, and the only non-scientist in the group. He'd been invited by Groves to witness the Trinity test, though he was under strict orders to keep everything he saw secret, until told otherwise.

The buses reached Trinity early on the morning of July 16. They stopped at their assigned spot, Compaña Hill, a rise in the desert twenty miles from the blast tower. The bus doors opened and Laurence and the other men stepped out onto the sand.

“The night was still pitch black, save for an occasional flash of lightning in the eastern sky,” Laurence recalled.

Military police came forward to check IDs. The scientists shivered in the rain. “With the darkness and the waiting in the chill of the desert, the tension became almost unendurable,” said Laurence.

A searchlight swept quickly across the bottoms of the thick clouds. Laurence looked toward the source of the light, twenty miles to the southeast. The bomb was there, he knew, sitting atop a steel tower. He wondered aloud how he was supposed to report on a story from twenty miles away.

“Don't worry,” a scientist said, patting Laurence on the back. “You'll see all you need to.”

*   *   *

T
ED
H
ALL SAT
with a group of soldiers in the back of an army truck on the edge of the Trinity test site.

Hall wasn't important enough to get an invitation to see the test up close. Instead, he was assigned to an army rescue crew. If radioactive fallout started spreading through the sky, it would be Hall's job to help evacuate people from local farms and villages.

Hall spent the early morning hours listening to nervous soldiers trying to distract themselves. “The guys discussed all sorts of things,” he remembered, “like marriage, divorce, the high divorce rate among Hollywood stars.”

The cold, rainy night passed slowly.

*   *   *

A
T ONE IN THE MORNING,
Groves rolled out of his cot, pulled on a shirt, and walked through rain and wind to the mess hall. Oppenheimer was still there.

Together they walked through puddles toward a concrete bomb shelter. They studied the sky, searching for pinpricks of starlight through the drifting clouds.

“If we postpone,” Oppenheimer said, “I'll never get my people up to pitch again.” It would be extremely difficult to get everyone—not to mention the bomb itself—to this point of readiness again.

“Naturally he was nervous,” Groves recalled, “although his mind was working at its usual extraordinary efficiency.”

At two-thirty, the head meteorologist, Jack Hubbard, came to the bomb shelter for a quick conference.

“What the hell's wrong with the weather?” demanded Groves.

Hubbard began to explain that a tropical air mass was moving in from—

Groves cut Hubbard off. He didn't want the science. He wanted to know if the rain would stop by 4:00 a.m.

No, said Hubbard, but there would probably be a window of clear skies from about 5:00 to 6:00 a.m.

“You'd better be right on this,” said Groves, “or I will hang you.”

Groves made Hubbard sign his forecast. Then he and Oppenheimer set the test for five-thirty.

*   *   *

A
FEW MINUTES AFTER FIVE,
George Kistiakowsky stood below the steel blast tower, a flashlight in his hand. The rain had slowed to a thin mist. The wind was dying down.

Kisty pointed a beam of light at a metal box beneath the tower. Kenneth Bainbridge crouched down and unlocked it. Inside was a switch. Bainbridge threw the switch, shut the box, and replaced the padlock. The bomb was armed—and set to explode in twenty minutes.

Kisty, Bainbridge, and the last few scientists at the tower jumped into jeeps and sped away. From that point on, everything would be run from the control room in Oppenheimer's bomb shelter, six miles from the blast site.

“The scene inside the shelter was dramatic beyond words,” recalled General Thomas Farrell, who was there with Oppenheimer. Scientists sat on the edge of stools in front of tables loaded with electronic panels, dials, switches, and blinking lights. At the first sign of trouble, they could shut the bomb down.

A physicist named Sam Allison sat in the corner of the bunker, a telephone in his hand. He lifted the receiver and spoke into the mouthpiece: “It is now zero minus twenty minutes.”

The countdown was broadcast to bomb shelters all over Trinity.

“We were told to lie down on the sand, turn our faces away from the blast, and bury our heads in our arms,” remembered Edward Teller, who was on Compaña Hill. “No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.”

“Zero minus fifteen minutes,” announced Allison.

Teller warned the others on the hill to be careful of sunburn. He took out a tube of suntan lotion, squeezed a bit onto his hand, and passed the tube on.

The reporter William Laurence looked on in shock. “It was an eerie sight,” he said, “to see a number of our highest-ranking scientists seriously rubbing sunburn lotion on their faces and hands in the pitch-blackness of the night, twenty miles away from the expected flash.”

Allison's voice came over the radio: “Zero minus ten minutes.”

Then scientists passed around thick pieces of dark glass, the kind used in welder's masks. The plan was to watch the blast through the glass. Klaus Fuchs took a piece of glass and held it up to his eyes.

Feynman refused the glass, instead climbing into the cab of a truck. The windshield, he figured, would protect his eyes by filtering out the blast's harmful ultraviolet light—and would give him a better view than the welder's glass.

A green flare shot into the sky and arced over the desert—the five-minute signal.

Ted Hall saw the flying green flame from his spot in the truck. He and the others turned their back to the blast site. They covered their faces with their arms.

*   *   *

I
N HIS BUNKER,
Oppenheimer leaned against a wooden beam, glancing back and forth from the sky to the scientists at the control panels.

“Zero minus two minutes.”

“Lord,” Oppenheimer said to no one in particular, “these affairs are hard on the heart.”

Groves lay on the ground in a separate bunker, his eyes facing away from the blast site. “As we approached the final minute, the quiet grew more intense,” he remembered. “I thought only of what I would do if, when the countdown got to zero, nothing happened.”

“Zero minus one minute.”

“As the time interval grew smaller and changed from minutes to seconds, the tension increased by leaps and bounds,” recalled General Farrell.

Unable to stay still a moment longer, George Kistiakowsky jumped up and ran to the top of the bomb shelter. “I put on dark glasses and turned away from the tower,” he said. “I didn't think anything would happen to me.”

“Zero minus ten seconds, nine, eight, seven…”

Oppenheimer lay on the ground in the bunker. His brother Frank lay on one side of him, General Farrell on the other.

“We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn,” said Isidor Rabi. “You could see your neighbor very dimly. Those ten seconds were the longest ten seconds that I ever experienced.”

“Four, three, two…”

“Oppenheimer, on whom had rested a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off,” remembered Farrell. “He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds he stared directly ahead.”

Allison shouted, “Zero!”

*   *   *

“A
ND THEN,
without a sound, the sun was shining. Or so it looked.”

That's how the physicist Otto Frisch described the first instant of the explosion. Isidor Rabi's account was similar: “There was an enormous flash of light, the brightest I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen.”

“The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun,” recalled General Farrell. “It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described.”

“I was looking directly at it, with no eye protection of any kind,” said Robert Serber, who watched from Compaña Hill. “I saw first a yellow glow, which grew almost instantly to an overwhelming white flash, so intense that I was completely blinded.” It was thirty seconds before he could see again.

“The thing that got me was not the flash but the blinding heat of a bright day on your face in the cold desert morning,” remembered Philip Morrison. “It was like opening a hot oven.”

Richard Feynman had known the flash was coming, and that he was safe behind the truck windshield—but it was so sudden and so bright, he instinctively ducked behind the dashboard.

“I look back up,” described Feynman, “and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange. A big ball of orange … a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges.”

“An enormous ball of fire,” said Rabi, “which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew.”

“Up it went,” reported William Laurence, “a great ball of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it expanded.”

The fireball continued rolling and rising, twisting itself into an enormous mushroom shape, glowing dark purple thousands of feet above the desert. In the bomb's eerie light, General Farrell watched Oppenheimer's reaction. “His face,” said Ferrell, “relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief.”

Frank Oppenheimer thought he heard his brother whisper, “It worked.”

*   *   *

T
HEN, ABOUT THIRTY SECONDS
after the blast, came the sound. Since light travels much faster than sound, the sight of the blast reached observers almost instantly, while the sound rumbled toward them at about five seconds per mile. The bomb's thunderclap bounced off the mountains and echoed back and forth across the desert.

The blast knocked George Kistiakowsky into a muddy puddle. He got up in time to see scientists scrambling out of the bunker. “Oppenheimer and the others rushed to join me,” Kisty remembered. “I slapped Oppenheimer on the back.”

“A loud cry filled the air,” wrote William Laurence of the scene on Compaña Hill. “The little groups that hitherto had stood rooted to the earth like desert plants broke into dance.”

In the back of an army truck, Ted Hall sat among shocked soldiers, watching the shimmering mushroom cloud rise and begin to fade. “I had rather expected that it would work,” Hall said.

Oppenheimer and Farrell jumped in a jeep, drove to Groves's bunker, and leaped out.

“I'll never forget the way he stepped out of the car,” Isidor Rabi said of Oppenheimer. “I'll never forget his walk … this kind of strut. He had
done
it.”

People were pouring whisky into paper cups, passing them around. Groves rushed up to Oppenheimer.

“I am proud of you,” said Groves as they shook hands.

“Thank you,” said Oppenheimer.

“The war is over,” Farrell said.

“Yes,” Groves agreed, “as soon as we drop one or two on Japan.”

*   *   *

“N
ATURALLY,
we were very jubilant over the outcome of the experiment,” Rabi later said of the mood among scientists that morning. “We turned to one another and offered congratulations—for the first few minutes. Then, there was a chill, which was not the morning cold.”