you owe me ten dollars.’” The distracted Los Alamos director searched his wallet. “It's empty,” he told Kistiakowsky, “you'll have to wait.” Bainbridge went around congratulating the S-10000 leaders on the success of the implosion method. “I finished by saying to Robert, ‘Now we are all sons of bitches.'… [He] told my younger daughter later that it was the best thing anyone said after the test.”
“Our first feeling was one of elation,” Weisskopf remembers, “then we realized we were tired, and then we were worried.” Rabi elaborates:
Naturally, we were very jubilant over the outcome of the experiment. While this tremendous ball of flame was there before us, and we watched it, and it rolled along, it became in time diffused with the clouds… Then it was washed out with the wind. We turned to one another and offered congratulations, for the first few minutes. Then, there was a chill, which was not the morning cold; it was a chill that came to one when one thought, as for instance when I thought of my wooden house in Cambridge, and my laboratory in New York, and of the millions of people living around there, and this power of nature which we had first understood it to be — well there it was.
Oppenheimer looked again into the
We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the
Other models also came to mind, Oppenheimer told an audience shortly after the war:
When it went off, in the New Mexico dawn, that first atomic bomb, we thought of Alfred Nobel, and his hope, his vain hope, that dynamite would put an end to wars. We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man's new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it. We knew that it was a new world, but even more we knew that novelty itself was a very old thing in human life, that all our ways are rooted in it.
The successful director of the Los Alamos bomb laboratory left with Farrell in a jeep. Rabi watched him arrive at Base Camp and saw a change:
He was in the forward bunker. When he came back, there he was, you know, with his hat. You've seen pictures of Robert's hat. And he came to where we were in the headquarters, so to speak. And his walk was like “High Noon” — I think it's the best I could describe it — this kind of strut. He'd done it.
“When Farrell came up to me,” Groves continues the story, “his first words were, ‘The war is over.’ My reply was, ‘Yes, after we drop two bombs on Japan.’ I congratulated Oppenheimer quietly with ‘I am proud of you,’ and he replied with a simple ‘Thank you.’” The theoretical physicist who was also a poet, who found physics, as Bethe says, “the best way to do philosophy,” had staked his claim on history. It was a larger claim, but more ambivalent, than any Nobel Prize.
The horses in the MP stable still whinnied in fright; the paddles of the dusty Aermotor windmill at Base Camp still spun away the energy of the blast; the frogs had ceased to make love in the puddles. Rabi broke out a bottle of whiskey and passed it around. Everyone took a swig. Oppenheimer went to work with Groves on a report for Stimson at Potsdam. “My faith in the human mind has been somewhat restored,” Hubbard overheard him say. He estimated the blast at 21,000 tons — 21 kilotons. Fermi knew from his paper experiment that it was at least 10 KT. Rabi had wagered 18. Later that morning Fermi and Herbert Anderson would don white surgical scrub suits and board the two lead-lined tanks to drive near Zero. Fermi's tank broke down after only a mile of approach and he had to walk back. Anderson clanked on. Through the periscope the young physicist studied the crater the bomb had made. The tower — the $20,000 winch, the shack, the wooden platform, the hundred feet of steel girders — was gone, vaporized down to the stubby twisted wreckage of its footings. What had been asphalt paving was now fused sand, green and translucent as jade. The cup strung to Anderson's rocket scooped up debris. His later radiochemical measurements confirmed 18.6 KT. That was nearly four times what Los Alamos had expected. Rabi won the pot.
Fermi experienced a delayed reaction, he told his wife: “For the first time in his life on coming back from Trinity he had felt it was not safe for him to drive. It had seemed to him as if the car were jumping from curve to curve, skipping the straight stretches in between. He had asked a friend to drive, despite his strong aversion to being driven.” Stanislaw Ulam, who chose not to attend the shot, watched the buses returning: “You could tell at once they had had a strange experience. You could see it on their faces. I saw that something very grave and strong had happened to their whole outlook on the future.”
A bomb exploded in a desert damages not much besides sand and cactus and the purity of the air. Stafford Warren, the physician responsible for radiological safety at Trinity, had to search to discover more lethal effects:
Partially eviscerated dead wild jack rabbits were found more than 800 yards from zero, presumably killed by the blast. A farm house three miles away had doors torn loose and suffered other extensive damage…
The light intensity was sufficient at nine miles to have caused temporary blindness and this would be longer lasting at shorter distances… The light together with the heat and ultraviolet radiation would probably cause severe damage to the unprotected eye at 5–6 miles; damage sufficient to put personnel out of action several days if not permanently.
The boxes of excelsior Frank Oppenheimer had set out, and the pine boards, also recorded the coming of the light: they were charred beyond 1,000 yards, slightly scorched up to 2,000 yards. At 1,520 yards — nine-tenths of a mile — exposed surfaces had heated almost instantly to 750°F.
William Penney, the British physicist who had studied blast effects for the Target Committee, held a seminar at Los Alamos five days after Trinity. “He applied his calculations,” Philip Morrison remembers. “He predicted that this [weapon] would reduce a city of three or four hundred thousand people to nothing but a sink for disaster relief, bandages, and hospitals. He made it absolutely clear in numbers. It was reality.”
Around the time of the Trinity shot, in the predawn dark at Hunter's Point in San Francisco Bay, a floodlit crane had loaded onto the deck of the
At 0836 Pacific War Time, four hours after the light flung from the Jornada del Muerto blanched the face of the moon, the
19
Tongues of Fire
At the end of March 1945, as Curtis LeMay's bombers shuttled back and forth burning cities, Colonel Elmer E. Kirkpatrick, a plainspoken Army engineer, arrived in the Marianas to locate a small corner where he could lodge Paul Tibbets' 509th Composite Group. Kirkpatrick met with LeMay and then with Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz
