rolled away from us across the field. ‘Minus five’ minutes, ‘minus three’ minutes, ‘one,’ ‘thirty seconds,’ ‘ten,’ ‘two,’ ‘zero.’” In the command bunker, Kurchatov turned abruptly to the open door. Light flooded the steppes. “It worked,” Kurchatov said simply. “What remarkable words,” writes Zukerman — “‘It worked. It worked!’” If it had not worked, one of them told a German chronicler later, they would all have been shot.
Flerov closed the door just before the shock wave hit the bunker with a roar and shattered the glass. “Right then Beria rushed to hug me,” Khariton recalls. “I could barely manage to tear myself away from him. The only thing I felt during those moments was relief.” The eyewitness at the north observation post saw the explosion:
The white fireball engulfed the tower and the shop and, expanding rapidly, changing color, it rushed upwards. The blast wave at the base, sweeping in its path structures, stone houses, machines, rolled like a billow from the center, mixing up stones, logs of wood, pieces of metal and dust into one chaotic mass. The fireball, rising and revolving, turned orange, red. Then dark streaks appeared. Streams of dust, fragments of brick and board were drawn in after it, as into a funnel. Overtaking the firestorm, the shock wave, hitting the upper layers of the atmosphere, passed through several levels of inversion, and there, as in a cloud chamber, the condensation of water vapor began… A strong wind weakened the sound, and it reached us like the roar of an avalanche.
“The shock wave shook the command bunker,” Pervukin recalls. “… We rushed out and saw the fire cloud and the column of dust and soil rising from the ground following the cloud and forming an enormous mushroom. The explosion was successful and we congratulated each other, kissing and hugging.” Beria hugged Kurchatov and shouted with the rest of them, but suspicion surged back to drown his exultation. He rushed into the bunker and ordered a call put through to one of his Bikini observers at the north post. “Did it look like the American one?” Golovin has the gulag master shouting into the phone. “How much? Haven't we slipped up? Doesn't Kurchatov humbug us? Quite the same? Good! Good! So may I report [to] Stalin that the experiment was a success? Good! Good!” Eagerly, Beria ordered the general on duty to connect him through to Stalin. It was two hours earlier in Moscow; Stalin's secretary, A. N. Poskrebyshev, warned Beria that the dictator was still asleep. “It's urgent, wake him up,” Beria demanded, flying high. “People present at the conversation heard the angry voice of Stalin” then, Golovin and Smirnov report:
“What do you want? Why are you calling?”
“Everything went right,” Beria said.
“I know already,” replied Stalin, and he hung up the phone.
Beria went wild and attacked the general on duty. “Who has told him? You are letting me down! Even here you spy on me! I'll grind you to dust!”
Within ten minutes, observers rolled into ground zero in lead-lined tanks to take soil samples. Kurchatov and others followed in four-wheel-drive Gazik vans, one of them recalls:
There were no traces left of the central tower. The surrounding columns and towers were damaged and listing to the side, the walls of the nearby buildings had collapsed, and the roofs had either been torn off or had caved in. There remained a distorted reminder, as in a nightmare, of the technical orderliness of the structures — everything had been mowed down, uprooted, and set afire.
Sparkling bluish black in front of us was the surface not of a crater but of a plate left by the explosion. One was almost not aware of the depression because it was very broad and gently sloping. And the surface was covered with slag, melted smooth and sparkling, that was formed from the soil scorched by the fire of the explosion. At the very center the melted surface was unbroken and as one moved away from the center one could see uneven and broken areas, and finally there were individual fritter-shaped pieces either formed on the spot or spilled out of the center… At a good speed the Gazik cut into the crust of slag crunching under the wheels…; two of us jumped out on the right and left, cut off hefty pieces, stuck them into a sack and the Gazik took us back.
At Trinity the desert sand had melted to a green glaze that came to be called trinitite; at First Lightning the slag was blue-black. The mushroom cloud blew away to the south, the north post observer reports, “losing its outlines and turning into the formless torn heap of clouds one might see after a gigantic fire.”
The First Lightning bomb had yielded twenty kilotons, comparable to its American counterparts at Trinity and Nagasaki. Kurchatov sent a handwritten report to Moscow the same day. The Soviet Council of Ministers soon secretly decreed medals and honors, cash prizes, automobiles and dachas for Kurchatov and his scientists, free education for their children at state expense, free transportation anywhere in the Soviet Union for them and for their families. The physicists’ bomb had not been a swindle after all, and now Stalin had a bomb on his hip and the West could no longer blackmail him. But he authorized no public announcement while his warehouse was still nearly bare.
Lewis Strauss had continued to push for a US capability to detect long-range atomic explosions after his initial proposal in April 1947. As a result, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), the predecessor to the CIA, had formed a committee to study the problem. The long-range detection committee established at its first meeting, in May, that no such capability existed and concluded that detection was possible three ways — by listening for the sound of the explosion, by monitoring the earthquake-like seismic wave that an explosion would cause and by collecting and measuring the gaseous or particulate radioactivity. CIG director Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter issued a report at the end of June 1947 recommending setting up a monitoring system but estimating that doing so would take two years. Two years was too long, David Lilienthal rejoined for the Atomic Energy Commission: “We cannot regard a two-year period as acceptable or realistic.”
Strauss had turned then to James Forrestal for support (when he told the Secretary of Defense that the US had no monitoring, Forrestal had responded incredulously, “Hell! we must be doing it!”)- By September, Forres-tal had passed the matter on to Hoyt Vandenberg and the US Air Force, which had the necessary planes and airfields, in particular three squadrons of weather-modified B-29s, the most significant of them the Alaska-based 375th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron that regularly patrolled from Alaska to Japan and over the Arctic, windward of the USSR. What the Air Force lacked was the scientific expertise. For that its new office of atomic testing — AFOAT-1 — turned to the AEC, which surprised it by warning that long-range detection was not an established technology but an undeveloped field. In December 1947, an advisory committee of which Robert Oppenhei-mer was chairman warned of “grave doubts that the techniques and the instruments for detection… are available either potentially or actually.” The Air Force, one of its generals testified later, “was frantic.” It had accepted a grave responsibility only to discover that there was no good way to carry it out.
By accident, an engineer for a private radiological laboratory, Tracerlab, had learned of the Air Force's difficulty. The small, two-year-old lab had gone after the long-range detection business eagerly, a Tracerlab scientist recalled. At a first meeting with the military, Tracerlab's sales manager “was busy counting up all the scalers, cutie pies, survey meters and so forth that they would need” when the scientist had asked, “Who was going to man all this stuff? They said they had nobody to run it. So I said I'd collect the staff… It was our equipment… and who is more competent to keep it running than our people? This was the sales pitch.” The lab won a contract.
It soon discovered that Los Alamos, where the AEC's expertise was concentrated, had been dragging its feet because Oppenheimer and others, as the Tracerlab scientist explains, “had come to the conclusion that there was no way you could detect radioactive isotopes at long distances from an explosion. It was a waste of time to even try since they were going to be atomized.” Oppenheimer had decided before the Hiroshima bombing that an air- burst weapon which did not pick up debris from the ground would dissociate its components to atoms — essentially to gas — which would quickly mix with the air to undetectable dilution. That was why the United States had repudiated Japanese claims of dangerous fallout at Hiroshima and Nagasaki: because both bombs had been air bursts.
In March 1948, Oppenheimer told the AFOAT-1 scientists face-to-face, with Edward Teller on hand to back him up, that seismic detection might work but that sonic and particularly radiological detection were nonsense. One of the Tracerlab men returned to his hotel room after the meeting and spent the evening working out calculations to show that the atoms of irradiated bomb material should stick together and agglomerate to particles of detectable size. He shared his calculations with Teller and others the next day (Oppenheimer was unavailable) and won
