The Age of Radiance (37 page)

Test director Kenneth Bainbridge was incensed that Enrico Fermi was taking bets
“on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world,” talk that terrified the enlisted men. Ed Teller, meanwhile, was standing with Ernest Lawrence, his face covered in suntan lotion, his hands shielded with thick gloves, and his welder goggles in place. This, too, scared the nearby soldiers, who after all had no idea what to expect. Bainbridge, meanwhile, would become famous at this moment for telling Oppenheimer, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.”

At 5:03 a.m., the arming party unlocked the switches and started the timer. Everyone was instructed to lie facedown in the sand, turning away from the bomb and burying their faces into their arms. No one did this.

Across the base at 5:10 a.m., speakers and shortwave radios broadcast the voice of physicist Sam Allison announcing for the first time in history what
is now known as a countdown. Allison:
“I think I’m the first person to count backward.”

At T-minus forty-five seconds, an automatic timing drum turned once a second, with a chime that struck at each turn. So there would be forty-four chimes before Allison bellowed, “Zero!”

One of the photographers was Berlyn Brixner, who had been told to be ready with his sixteen-millimeter black-and-white movie camera to film something that had never before been seen, which would begin with the brightest light that had ever reached the earth in human history. Brixner at least saw the irony: “The theoretical people had calculated a ten-sun brightness. So that was easy. All I had to do was go out and point my camera at the sun and take some pictures. Ten times that was easy to calculate.”

Civilian tech Jack Aeby had helped Emilio Segrè set up radiation instruments hanging on barrage balloons eight hundred yards from Fat Man; immediately after transmitting their results, they would be vaporized. Aeby had brought his own camera with him, filled with the new Anscochrome color slide film; his boss had gotten it through security. Jack set up a folding chair in the dirt and put on his government-issued welding goggles. He didn’t see that one of the lenses had a crack.

At T-minus thirty seconds, a voltmeter indicated that the detonation circuit had achieved full charge. Those standing by Oppenheimer say he seemed to have completely stopped breathing. He held himself up by holding on to a wood fence post and stared at the tower.

Then on July 16, 1945, at 05:29:45 mountain time, in a predawn desert, pitch-black and silent, a light exploded. That light, first white, then red, then purple, was visible on the horizon for 150 miles. As it reddened, it reduced in intensity enough to reveal a fireball raising a self-illuminated mushroom cloud of pulverized debris. The cloud rose 7.5 miles into the air, while the sky around it boiled purple from the ionization of the atmosphere. It smelled first like the desert, and then like a waterfall.

Robert Serber:
“At the instant of the explosion I was looking directly at it, with no eye protection of any kind. I saw first a yellow glow, which grew almost instantly into an overwhelming white flash, so intense that I was completely blinded. There was a definite sensation of heat. The brilliant illumination seemed to last for about three to five seconds, changing to yellow and then to red; at this stage it appeared to have a radius of about twenty degrees. The first thing I succeeded in seeing after being blinded by the flash looked like a dark violet column several thousand feet high. This column must actually have been quite bright, or I would not have been
able to distinguish it. By twenty or thirty seconds after the explosion I was regaining normal vision. At a height of perhaps twenty thousand feet, two or three thin horizontal layers of shimmering white cloud were formed, perhaps due to condensation in the negative phase of the shock wave. Some time later, the noise of the explosion reached us. It had the quality of distant thunder, but was louder. The sound, due to reflections from nearby hills, returned and repeated and reverberated for several seconds, very much like thunder. A column of white smoke appeared over the point of the explosion, rising very rapidly, and spreading slightly as it rose. In a few seconds it reached cloud level, and the clouds in the immediate neighborhood seemed to evaporate and disappear. The column continued to rise and spread to a height of about twice the cloud level. There was no appearance of mushrooming at any height. A smoke cloud also was spreading near ground level. The grandeur and magnitude of the phenomenon were completely breathtaking.”

Edwin M. McMillan: “At about thirty seconds, the general appearance was similar to a goblet; the ball I estimated to be about a mile in diameter and about four miles above the ground, glowing with a dull red; a dark stem connected it with the ground, and spread out in a thin dust layer that extended to a radius of about six miles. When the red glow faded out, a most remarkable effect made its appearance. The whole surface of the ball was covered with a purple luminescence, like that produced by the electrical excitation of air, and caused undoubtedly by the radioactivity of the material in the ball. This was visible for about five seconds; by this time the sunlight was becoming bright enough to obscure luminous effects. At some time near the end of the luminescence (I am not sure whether it was before or after) a great cloud broke out of the top of the ball and rose very rapidly to a height of about eight miles, expanding to a rather irregular shape several times as large as the ball. The whole spectacle was so tremendous and one might almost say fantastic that the immediate reaction of the watchers was one of awe rather than excitement. After some minutes of silence, a few people made remarks like ‘Well, it worked,’ and then conversation and discussion became general. I am sure that all who witnessed this test went away with a profound feeling that they had seen one of the great events of history.”

Enrico Fermi: “After a few seconds the rising flames lost their brightness and appeared as a huge pillar of smoke with an expanded head like a gigantic mushroom that rose rapidly beyond the clouds probably to a height of thirty thousand feet. After reaching its full height, the smoke stayed stationary for a while before the wind started dissipating it. About forty seconds
after the explosion the air blast reached me. I tried to estimate its strength by dropping from about six feet small pieces of paper before, during, and after the passage of the blast wave. Since, at the time, there was no wind, I could observe very distinctly and actually measure the displacement of the pieces of paper that were in the process of falling while the blast was passing. The shift was about two and a half meters, which, at the time, I estimated to correspond to the blast that would be produced by ten thousand tons of T.N.T.”

Philip Morrison: “The column looked rather like smoke and flame rising from an oil fire. This turbulent red column rose straight up several thousand feet in a few seconds growing a mushroom-like head of the same kind. I noticed two deep thuds which sounded rather like a kettle drum rhythm being played some distance away. I remember the sound as being without any important high frequency components as cracks, etc.”

James Conant:
“The enormity of the light and its length quite stunned me. My instantaneous reaction was that something had gone wrong and that the thermal nuclear transformation of the atmosphere, once discussed as a possibility and only jokingly referred to a few minutes earlier, had actually occurred. . . . It looked like an enormous pyrotechnic display with great boiling of luminous vapors, some spots being brighter than others. Very shortly this began to fade and without thinking the [welder’s] glass was lowered and the scene viewed with the naked eye. The ball of gas was enlarging rapidly and turning into a [ten-thousand-foot-high] mushroom. It was reddish purple, and against the early dawn very luminous.”

Next to him was Groves, grumbling as ever: “Well, there must be something in nucleonics after all.”

General Farrell’s War Department report on the cataclysm in the American desert was released to the press the day after Hiroshima:
“The whole country was lighted by searching light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described. . . . Thirty seconds after the explosion came first the air blast, pressing hard against the people and things; to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday. . . .”

Kisty forgot to take cover when the ten suns exploded. He was knocked flat into the sand.

Dick Feynman was sitting in a military truck and thought the windshield would protect his eyes, so he didn’t use any goggles. He guessed wrong and was temporarily blinded.

One man at base refused to use the protective glass and burned his corneas. He was given morphine and was not expected to be permanently blinded.

Jack Aeby had put his Perfex 44 camera on “bulb” and, in the dark before Zero, opened up the shutter, figuring that way he’d get a good image of the flash. Suddenly the light hit the cut in Aeby’s glasses and he saw a brilliant electric line.
“I could see that crack for some time afterward. . . . I released the shutter, cranked the diaphragm down, changed the shutter speed and fired three times in succession. I quit at three because I was out of film.” Berlyn Brixner: “I was temporarily blinded. I looked to the side. The Oscura mountains were as bright as day. I saw this tremendous ball of fire, and it was rising. I was just spellbound! I followed it as it rose. There was no sound! It all took place in absolute silence. Then it dawned on me. I’m the photographer! I’ve gotta get that ball of fire.”

McKibben: “Then an amazing thing: it was followed by echoes from the mountains. There was one echo after another. A real symphony of echoes. Too bad nobody had a recorder on that. It would have been played many times since then.” Brixner: “I was looking up, and I noticed there was a red haze up there, and it seemed to be coming down on us. Pretty soon the radiation monitors said, ‘The radiation is rising! We’ve got to evacuate!’ I said, ‘That’s fine, but not until I get all the film from my cameras.’ ”

Hans Bethe remembered his first thought was
“We’ve done it!” His second was “What a terrible weapon have we fashioned.”

Joan Hinton:
“It was like being at the bottom of an ocean of light. We were bathed in it from all directions. The light withdrew into the bomb as if the bomb sucked it up. Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up.”

Frank Oppenheimer:
“When one first looked up, one saw the fireball, and then almost immediately afterwards, this unearthly hovering cloud. It was very bright and very purple. . . . I think the most terrifying thing was this really brilliant purple cloud, black with radioactive dust, that hung there, and you had no feeling of whether it would go up or drift towards you.” About the conversation with his brother at the time: “I think we just said, ‘It worked.’ ”

Soldier Val Fitch:
“Apparently no one had told the military policeman, stationed at the door of the bunker to control access, what to expect. He was absolutely pale and a look of incredible alarm was on his face as he came away from the bunker door to stand beside me and view the sight. I simply said what was on my mind: ‘The war will soon be over.’ ”

The yield confounded all cynics—twenty-one thousand tons of TNT—84,000,000,000,000 joules. The terrain below the tower was pounded down into a crater eleven hundred feet wide; sand melted into a light green glass. When the bomb exploded, its tower was vaporized, the iron staining the silicon of the melted desert sand a startling bloodred.

The shock wave, traveling at the speed of sound, rattled windows at a distance of two hundred miles. It reached the observation point forty seconds after the light, literally rolling the ground under the observers’ feet. Kenneth Greisen:
“A tremendous cloud of smoke was pouring upwards, some parts having brilliant red and yellow colors, like clouds at sunset. These parts kept folding over and over like dough in a mixing bowl. . . . At about this time I noticed a blue color surrounding the smoke cloud. Then someone shouted that we should observe the shock wave traveling along the ground. The appearance of this was a brightly lighted circular area, near the ground, slowly spreading out towards us. The color was yellow.”

Hans Bethe:
“Practically everybody at the Trinity test was a scientist except one person, a journalist with the
New York Times
by the name of William Laurence. We were quite far away, twenty kilometers on Compania Hill, so that long after the fireball, the shock wave followed and made a tremendous rumble. Laurence was terribly afraid and cried out, ‘WHAT WAS THAT?’ So I explained to him that sound takes some time to propagate as compared to light.” Actually there was one other nonscientist, nonmilitary of the 240 in attendance—the legendary J. E. Miera. He was there to make the cheeseburgers.

William Laurence:
“The big boom came about 100 seconds after the Great Flash—the first cry of a newborn world. It brought the silent, motionless silhouettes to life, gave them a voice. A loud cry filled the air. The little groups that hitherto had stood rooted to the earth like desert plants broke into dance.”

To calm area residents, the army immediately notified local radio stations and newspapers that Alamogordo Air Base’s munitions dump had exploded, but that there were no fatalities. But many New Mexicans knew that this was no armory mishap. Rowena Baca:
“My grandmother shoved me and my cousin under a bed because she thought it was the end of the world.” Jim Madrid: “We saw this huge, huge light coming in from the north. It rose from the heavens, so bright, so extremely bright. It was the biggest thing I had ever seen in my life. It was rolling, getting fatter and bigger and taller. My mother said, ‘The sun is coming close. The world is coming to an end.’ She told me to drop to my knees, but I kept looking. If it was the end of the
world, I wanted to see it. I was waiting for God to come out from around the ball of fire.”