Lawrence was bent down, just getting out of the car, when the bomb exploded. “I was enveloped with a warm brilliant yellow-white light—from darkness to brilliant sunshine in an instant, and as I remember I momentarily was stunned by the surprise,” he later wrote in the report that Groves demanded of eyewitnesses.112
Teller had just begun to lift the heavy goggles from his eyes to get a better look when he realized that the light outside was as bright as the sun at midday and the heat from the bomb palpable.
Against all advice, Serber had been looking directly at the bomb with unshielded eyes when it exploded; he was momentarily blinded.113 Alvarez’s was a unique perspective: kneeling between the pilot and copilot in the cockpit of a B-29 some twenty miles from ground zero, he saw the bomb as a brilliant light diffused through thick cloud cover. In an artist’s pad balanced on his knees, Luis sketched the bulbous top of the roiling mushroom cloud pushing through the undercast.114
Lying facedown next to his brother outside the control bunker 10,000 yards south of the tower, Robert Oppenheimer waited for the deep, low rumbling sound of the bomb to subside before he stood up. Oppie then turned to Frank with a smile that mixed pride with relief and said, simply, “It worked.”115
Later, Bush and Conant walked down to the road that led to the control bunker and waited. As an army car drove by trailing a cloud of dust, Groves and Oppenheimer visible in the backseat, the two men theatrically snapped to attention and, grinning, doffed their hats.116
8
A STONE’S THROW FROM DESPAIR
THE MOOD IN GROVES’S plane on the flight back to Washington was triumphant. In the euphoria that followed Trinity, all talk of a demonstration was forgotten.1 From Washington, Lawrence traveled on to Oak Ridge, where U-235 was already being scraped from the Calutrons for a second uranium bomb.2 From New Mexico, Serber and Alvarez headed west across the Pacific to Tinian Island, where B-29s would launch the atomic raids against Japan.
Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos to find the latest report concerning the Super on his desk. The most recent calculations suggested that a thermonuclear reaction in tritium and deuterium could indeed be triggered by an atomic bomb.3 Having just had a glimpse into the abyss, Oppie now saw before him the yawning chasm.
On July 27, 1945, Groves felt it proper to warn Stimson and Marshall where the future could be headed. It might be possible to create a weapon far more powerful than that just tested in New Mexico, Groves reported, using a Little Boy–type bomb as the detonator, a few hundred grams of tritium as a booster, and 1 cubic meter of liquid deuterium as the fuel. The specter that Teller had raised at Berkeley three years earlier returned to haunt those pondering the Super anew: “Such a bomb might introduce the possibility of world destruction if the theories of some scientists are correct that the explosion could ignite the entire world’s atmosphere. Further study of this possibility would have to be made.”4
* * *
But the immediate focus, of course, was upon Japan. Sitting out a vigil, Groves got word of the atomic attack on Hiroshima shortly before midnight on August 5 at his Washington office. News of the bombing came to Los Alamos in the stilted, staccato language of a telegram that was garbled in transmission. Manley passed the word along to Oppenheimer, who, if not yet knowing of the bomb’s effects, at least understood its significance.5
As an observer in a B-29 that accompanied the Enola Gay over the Japanese city, Alvarez had been the closest witness to the lab’s handiwork. Luie was onboard to monitor the performance of parachute-rigged detectors he had designed for measuring the explosive force of the atomic bombs.6 After dropping the detectors, the chase plane had climbed and turned sharply to escape the shock wave from Little Boy. Alvarez missed seeing the actual explosion but, peering out a porthole a moment later, witnessed the aftermath: “I looked out and all I could see was a black, roiling cloud over what looked like a forest. My first thought to myself was that Ernest Lawrence would be furious when he learned that they had wasted all his uranium on a forest. I didn’t see any sign of a city.”7
Teller did not learn of the destruction of Hiroshima until midmorning, while he was walking to work. “One down!”—the greeting shouted out by the driver of a speeding jeep—remained incomprehensible until Edward joined his colleagues at the Tech Area.8
In Berkeley, Lawrence heard the news of the bombing at home over the radio. After predicting to Molly that the war would soon be over, Ernest looked to the future. “Now we will have no more war and the most backward countries will be able to start catching up,” he told his wife.9
On campus later in the day, Lawrence roamed the laboratories, shops, and offices of the Rad Lab, shaking hands and receiving congratulations. Groves telephoned Ernest shortly after noon to thank him and the Rad Lab for their role in the project.10
But doubts, second-guesses, and even regrets were not long in coming. Berkeley astronomer Donald Shane, the head of scientific personnel at Los Alamos, remembered Oppenheimer as “excited and elated” during dinner the night after Hiroshima was bombed.11 Yet as details of that attack and of the second atomic raid—on Nagasaki, three days later—drifted back to the lab, the confident mood and “high-noon strut” that Rabi recalled of
