Fear Itself by Ira Katznelson

Author:Ira Katznelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NORTON
Published: 2014-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

11 “Wildest Hopes”

THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB exploded on American soil. At 11:00 P.M. on July 15, 1945, already morning in Potsdam as Churchill, Stalin, and Truman gathered for their victors’ summit, a convoy of Manhattan Project scientists, administrators, and one journalist, William Laurence, a fifty-seven-year-old Lithuanian-born science reporter for the New York Times, set out for a secret destination 212 miles south of Los Alamos to observe the start of the atomic age. Stationed on a hill in the desert at the edge of New Mexico’s remote and inaccessible Alamogordo Air Base, twenty miles from test site Zero,1 they were cautioned not to look until the flash had ended and a mushroom cloud had risen. Manhattan Project leaders, among them Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Enrico Fermi, and Leslie Groves, waited in the control room for Robert Oppenheimer, who had named the test Trinity, to issue the command. Some had participated in a betting pool about the size of the explosion.2 The order was given at 5:30 A.M. on the sixteenth. A bomb, referred to as “the Gadget,” with a plutonium core in the form of two small hemispheres, was to drop from the one-hundred-foot-high steel tower on which it stood poised.

Laurence reported:

There rose from the bowels of the earth, a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling luminosity. Up it went, a great ball of fire a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it expanded, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years. For a fleeting instant the color was unearthly green, such as one sees only in the corona of the sun during a total eclipse. It was as though the earth had opened up and the skies had split. One felt as though one were present at the moment of creation when God said: “Let there be light.”3

Another eyewitness, Brig. Gen. T. F. Farrell, the chief of field operations for the Manhattan Project, described the event in more prosaic prose:

Dr. Conant reached over and shook hands with General Groves. Dr. Bush, who was on the other side of the General, did likewise. Dr. Kistiakowsky4 threw his arms around Dr. Oppenheimer and embraced him with shouts of glee. Others were equally enthusiastic. All pent-up emotions were released in those few minutes and seemed to sense immediately that the explosion had far exceeded the most optimistic expectations and wildest hopes of the scientists.5

Only animals, including a herd of antelope, disappeared that morning. That all was to change, of course, three weeks later, once three B-29s took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas, some fifteen hundred miles east of Japan, on August 6, 1945.

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