In the middle of the desert, Oppie had instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to build a one-hundred-foot tower of steel struts in concrete footings. On top was an oak platform. The bomb had been winched up to the platform on Saturday.
The scientists never used the word ‘bomb’. They called it ‘the gadget’. At its heart was a ball of plutonium, a metal that did not exist in nature but was created as a by-product in nuclear piles. The ball weighed ten pounds and contained all the plutonium in the world. Someone had calculated that it was worth a billion dollars.
Thirty-two detonators on the surface of the ball would go off simultaneously, creating such powerful inward pressure that the plutonium would become more dense and go critical.
No one really knew what would happen next.
The scientists were running a betting pool, dollar a ticket, on the force of the explosion measured in equivalent tons of TNT. Edward Teller bet 45,000 tons. Oppie bet 300 tons. The official forecast was 20,000 tons. The night before, Enrico Fermi had offered to take side bets on whether the blast would wipe out the entire state of New Mexico. General Groves had not found it funny.
The scientists had had a perfectly serious discussion about whether the explosion would ignite the atmosphere of the entire earth, and destroy the planet; but they had come to the conclusion that it would not. If they were wrong, Greg just hoped it would happen fast.
The trial had originally been scheduled for 4 July. However, every time they tested a component, it failed; so the big day had been postponed several times. Back at Los Alamos, on Saturday, a mock-up they called the Chinese Copy had refused to ignite. In the betting pool, Norman Ramsey had picked zero, gambling that the bomb would be a dud.
Today detonation had been scheduled for 2 a.m., but at that time there had been a thunderstorm – in the desert! Rain would bring the radioactive fallout down on the heads of the watching scientists, so the blast was postponed.
The storm had ended at dawn.
Greg was at a bunker called S-10000, which was the control room. Like most of the scientists, he was standing outside for a better view. Hope and fear struggled for mastery of his heart. If the bomb was a dud, the efforts of hundreds of people – plus about two billion dollars – would have gone for nothing. And if the bomb was not a dud, they might all be killed in the next few minutes.
Beside him was Wilhelm Frunze, the young German scientist he had first met in Chicago. ‘What would have happened, Will, if lightning had struck the bomb?’
Frunze shrugged. ‘No one knows.’
A green Verey rocket shot into the sky, startling Greg.
‘Five-minute warning,’ Frunze said.
Security had been haphazard. Santa Fe, the nearest town to Los Alamos, was crawling with well-dressed FBI agents. Leaning nonchalantly against walls in their tweed jackets and neckties, they were obvious to local residents, who wore blue jeans and cowboy boots.
The Bureau was also illegally tapping the phones of hundreds of people involved in the Manhattan Project. This bewildered Greg. How could the nation’s premier law enforcement agency systematically commit criminal acts?
Nevertheless, army security and the FBI had identified some spies and quietly removed them from the project, including Barney McHugh. But had they found them all? Greg did not know. Groves had been forced to take risks. If he had fired everyone the FBI asked him to, there would not have been enough scientists left to build the bomb.
Unfortunately, most scientists were radicals, socialists and liberals. There was hardly a conservative among them. And they believed that the truths discovered by science were for humankind to share, and should never be kept secret in the service of one regime or country. So, while the American government was keeping this huge project top secret, the scientists held discussion groups about sharing nuclear technology with all the nations of the world. Oppie himself was suspect: the only reason he was not in the Communist Party was that he never joined clubs.
Right now Oppie was lying on the ground next to his kid brother, Frank, also an outstanding physicist, also a Communist. They both held pieces of welding glass through which to observe the explosion. Greg and Frunze had similar pieces of glass. Some of the scientists were wearing sunglasses.
Another rocket went off. ‘One minute,’ said Frunze.
Greg heard Oppie say: ‘Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.’
He wondered if those would be Oppie’s last words.
Greg and Frunze lay on the sandy earth near Oppie and Frank. They all held their visors of welding glass in front of their eyes and gazed towards the test site.
Facing death, Greg thought about his mother, his father, and his sister Daisy in London. He wondered how much they would miss him. He thought, with mild regret, of Margaret Cowdry, who had dumped him for a guy who was willing to marry her. But most of all he thought of Jacky Jakes and his son, Georgy, now nine years old. He passionately wanted to watch Georgy grow up. He realized Georgy was the main reason he was hoping to stay alive. Stealthily, the child had crept into his soul and stolen his love. The strength of this feeling surprised Greg.
A gong chimed, a strangely inappropriate sound in the desert.
‘Ten seconds.’
Greg suffered an impulse to get up and run away. Silly though it was – how far could he get in ten seconds? – he had to force himself to lie still.
The bomb went off at five twenty-nine and forty-five seconds.
