The Age of Radiance (36 page)

Immediately after the Joliot-Curies demonstrated artificial irradiation, Petrograd’s Institute of Physics and Technology (Fiztekh) began a nuclear physics department, selecting as its leader the thirty-one-year-old Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov. Like Fermi, Kurchatov had a chance meeting with a physics textbook that set the course of his life, but in his case it was
Accomplishments of Modern Engineering
, written by Orso Corbino, who played such a signature role in Fermi’s career. Also like Enrico, Igor
“worked harder than anyone else. He never gave himself airs, never let his accomplishments go to his head,” as one colleague described him, and by 1934 Kurchatov had built the only cyclotron in the world outside Lawrence’s Republic. He was nicknamed the Beard because he had stopped shaving until Russia was victorious over Germany, which was distinctive as only old men had beards in post-Peter-the-Great Russia.

Soviet scientists were just as fearful of an atomic Hitler as their American émigré counterparts. Flerov: “It seemed to us that if someone could make a nuclear bomb, it would be neither Americans, English, or French but Germans. The Germans had brilliant chemistry; they had technology for the production of metallic uranium; they were involved in experiments on the centrifugal separation of uranium isotopes. And, finally, the Germans possessed heavy water and reserves of uranium. Our first impression was that
Germans were capable of making the thing. It was obvious what the consequences would be if they succeeded.”

Beria wanted to hire one of Russia’s most famous scientists to head an atomic program, but Stalin disagreed, saying (as Groves might have about Oppenheimer) “that it was necessary to promote a young, not well-known scientist for whom such a post would be . . . his life work.” On February 11, 1943, Kurchatov became the Soviet Oppie, and in March 1943, as part of Lend-Lease, the Soviet Purchasing Commission placed orders for uranium oxide and uranium nitrate, which Groves authorized, but only after being pressured by the Lend-Lease Administration. “Where that influence came from,” Groves told a congressional committee after the war, “you can guess as well as I can. It was certainly prevalent in Washington, and it was prevalent throughout the country, and the only spot I know of that was distinctly anti-Russian at an early period was the Manhattan Project. . . . There was never any doubt about [our attitude] from sometime along about October 1942.” Then in early 1945, the Russians cleared Czechoslovakia of Germans and began buying pitchblende from Joachimsthal—the same Bohemian source used by the Curies. On August 12, 1945, Henry D. Smyth published “Atomic Energy for Military Purposes,” which deliberately left out crucial details, but the Soviets were able to use the materials supplied by Fuchs, Greenglass, Hall, and their other agents to reinstate those details. When they were finished, World War II was essentially over and the Cold War, with its nuclear arms race so long predicted and feared by Leo Szilard and Niels Bohr, had begun.

I
n early 1945, German surrender seemed inevitable, yet in the same period, 110,000 Japanese died defending Okinawa. Day after day, the mesa was rocked with explosions from the canyons, rattling windows and filling the air with the smell of pine and ordnance.

When Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, Oppenheimer held a memorial service for the community and said in his speech about hearing that the president was gone,
“Many of us looked with deep trouble to the future; many of us felt less certain that our works would be to a good end; all of us were reminded of how precious a thing human greatness is. We have been living through years of great evil, and of great terror. Roosevelt has been our president, our commander in chief, and, in an old and unperverted sense, our leader. All over the world men have looked to him for guidance and have seen symbolized in him their hope that the evils of this time would not
be repeated; that the terrible sacrifices which have been made, and those that still have to be made, would lead to a world more fit for human habitation. . . . It is right that we should dedicate ourselves to the hope that his good works will not have ended with his death.”

Three weeks later, on May 2, 1945, Berlin surrendered.

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El Camino Real followed the Rio Grande across the American Southwest, the river curved in a 120-mile bend, lengthening and complicating the journey with deep canyons, Apache assaults, and patches of quicksand—the original badlands. A well-known shortcut, well-known for being bleak and harsh, required at least three days of forced twenty-four-hour marching with no water. After Pueblo Indians, revolting against the Spanish, lost over five hundred souls in nine days traveling the route in 1680, the shortcut was named Jornada del Muerto—the Journey of Death. Here in July of 1945, Oppenheimer would test the Nagasaki plutonium gadget that inspired him to quote Hindu scripture (
I am become Death
), building a base camp that meant dust in the lungs, scorpions in the bed, and eighteen-hour workdays of 100°F. Twice, night-flying B-29 pilots mistook the camp for a practice target and bombed it.

Frank Oppenheimer:
“We spent several days finding escape routes through the desert, and making little maps so everybody could be evacuated.”

Soldier Val Fitch:
“In May, one hundred tons of TNT were exploded near the tower site as a calibration of some of the instrumentation. In view of what was to come later I doubt if the exercise was of any value, but at the time I thought that one hundred tons made an incredible explosion.”

George Kistiakowsky deliberately transferred the bomb to the Jornada camp on Friday the thirteenth, and Hans Bethe filed his report “Expected Damage of the Gadget”:

Comparison with TNT: The most striking difference between the gadget and a TNT charge is in the temperatures generated. The latter
yields temperatures of a few thousand degrees whereas the former pushes the temperature as high as [tens of millions of degrees]. . . .

The actual damage depends much on the objective. Houses begin to be smashed under shocks of 1/10 to 1/5 of an atmosphere. For objects such as steel supported buildings and machinery, greater pressures are required and the duration of the shock is very important. If the duration of the pressure pulse is smaller than the natural vibration period of the structure, the integral of the pressure over the duration T of the impulse is significant for the damage. If the pulse lasts for several vibration periods, the peak pressure is the important quantity. . . .

Other Damage: The neutrons emitted from the gadget will diffuse through the air over a distance of 1 to 2 km, nearly independent of the energy release. Over this region, their intensity will be sufficient to kill a person.

The effect of the radioactive fission products depends entirely on the distance to which they are carried by the wind. If 1 kg of fission products is distributed uniformly over an area of about 100 square miles, the radioactivity during the first day will represent a lethal dose (= 500 R units): after a few days, only about 10 R units per day are emitted. If the material is more widely distributed by the wind, the effects of the radioactivity will be relatively minor.

Originally Groves planned to detonate Fat Man inside a 240-ton steel canister so that, in case of disaster, the plutonium could be rescued. But it was impossible to construct the bomb inside this containment shell, so instead they sealed the windows of a ranch bedroom with tape to reduce the dust and assembled it there.

The Fat Man gadget, grungy and cobbled together, was composed of thirty-two implosion lenses weighing fifty-three hundred pounds, with an outer layer of 60 percent RDX (also known as cyclonite or hexogen, RDX was a popular industrial and military explosive in this era as it was more powerful than TNT), 39 percent TNT, and 1 percent wax, and an inner layer of 70 percent barium nitrate and 30 percent TNT, surrounding the split sides of the plutonium orb. Each lens was tethered by cloth-insulated wires that arched every which way to a Y-1773 detonator, which could be triggered so that all thirty-two would ignite precisely at the same time. Within the orb was the initiator of beryllium and polonium, already generating power and warm to the touch. When they tried aligning the orb’s halves inside Kisty’s
lenses, however, they wouldn’t fit. No one could understand it. Then someone suggested that the plutonium had gotten warm in the car ride over and expanded, and if they waited a bit, it would contract back to its design specifications. This turned out to be the case.

To raise Fat Man to its tower, Groves brought in a $20,000 winch, but everyone was so nervous that the Bomb’s five-ton weight would break the winch’s cable that soldiers used an untold number of mattresses to mound a fifteen-foot-high cushion on the linoleum-covered tower base. Here was the future of warfare, ominous in its bulging TNT and hurricane of ignition wires, protected by a hillock of beds.

The desert floor was scattered with instruments, to measure as many of the results as possible: Light. Sound. Force. Radiation. Timing. Density. Blowback.

As a much younger man, Oppenheimer had been introduced to poet John Donne by Jean Tatlock, the great love of his life who had committed suicide, and Trinity was named for two Donne poems, “Holy Sonnets XIV” and “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness”:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you

As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

As west and east

In all flat maps—and I am one—are one,

So death doth touch the resurrection.

That day, Kitty gave Robert a four-leaf clover she’d found in their garden.

A thunderstorm eased in on Saturday the fourteenth and lingered. Everyone looked at the high metal tower with its giant metal gadget in its nest of cabling and saw a perfect target for a lightning strike.
“Oppenheimer was really terribly worried about the fact that the thing was so complicated, and so many people know exactly how it was put together that it would be easy to sabotage,” Dan Hornig, the electric trigger’s designer, said. “So he thought someone had better babysit it right up until the moment it was fired. They asked for volunteers, and as the youngest guy present, I was selected. . . . Little metal shack, open on one side, no windows on the other three, and a sixty-watt bulb with just a folding chair for me to sit on beside the bomb, and there I was! All I had was a telephone. I wasn’t equipped to defend myself.
I don’t know what I was supposed to do. The possibility of lightning striking the tower was very much on my mind.” Guarding the tower’s base was control-room operator Joe McKibben, who fell asleep on the linoleum floor:
“I started dreaming Kistiakowsky had gotten a garden hose and was sprinkling the bomb. Then I woke up and realized there was rain in my face.”

Oppenheimer got the results of a dress rehearsal that had been done with a replica bomb and no plutonium in another canyon. It had failed, and he emotionally fell apart. An emergency meeting of Oppenheimer, Groves, Conant, and Kistiakowsky led to the three yelling at Kisty that his design was the problem. The Cossack insisted that his lenses would work.

On Sunday the fifteenth, Hans Bethe called to say that the dummy test failed due to a calculation error that wasn’t applicable to Fat Man, and Trinity was rescheduled for July 16, at 4:00 a.m. Joe McKibben was working in the control room: “I was told that [Oppie] came in the door and observed me at the controls and went away. Just to see that I was sane.”

The bad weather continued, and besides the lightning, the meteorologist warned that the wet air might short out the electrical triggers, and that winds might carry radiant fallout to nearby towns, including the mesa itself. Groves was so worried about sabotage that when the weatherman suggested another postponement, the general suggested he be hanged.

Dan Hornig: “All the senior scientists who weren’t actually involved in the test had a betting pool. The betting ran from a complete dud to little explosions to middle-sized explosions. Just a few people were willing to bet that it would produce what it was supposed to produce with something like twenty thousand tons of TNT’s worth. There was a lot of skepticism.”