by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Teller claims in his memoirs to have thought in 1945 that use of the bomb without a demonstration and a warning “would be of uncertain expediency and of deplorable morality.” But his actual reply to Szilard, dated July 2, 1945, shows that he came to quite the contrary conclusion. “I am not really convinced of your objections [to immediate military use of the weapon],” Teller wrote. The gadget was indeed a “terrible” weapon, but Teller thought the only hope for humanity was to “convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat use might even be the best thing.” At no point did Teller even hint that he thought a demonstration practical, or a warning necessary. “The accident that we worked out this dreadful thing,” Teller wrote Szilard, “should not give us the responsibility of having a voice in how it is to be used.”
This, of course, was one of the arguments Oppenheimer had advanced in his June 16 memo to Stimson. He was convinced that nothing more need be done by the scientific community. He told Ralph Lapp and Edward Creutz, two physicists at Los Alamos who had agreed to circulate Szilard’s petition, that, “since an opportunity has been given to people here to express, through him, their opinions on the matters concerned, the proposed method [the petition] was somewhat redundant and probably not very satisfactory.” Oppie could be persuasive. Creutz explained to Szilard, somewhat apologetically, “Because of his [Oppenheimer’s] very frank and non-peremptory treatment of the situation, I should like to abide by his suggestions.” Oppie would not expedite the petition to Washington; instead, it would be sent through normal Army channels—and it would arrive too late.
Oppie informed Groves of the Szilard petition—and did so in a disparaging tone: “The enclosed note [from Szilard to Creutz] is a further incident in the developments which I know you have watched with interest.” Groves’ aide, Colonel Nichols, called Groves that same day and in the course of their discussion of the Szilard petition, “Nichols asked why not get rid of the lion [Szilard] and general stated can’t do that at this time.” Groves understood that firing or arresting Szilard would inspire a revolt among the other scientists. But with Oppenheimer equally annoyed by Szilard’s actions, Groves felt confident that the problem could be safely contained until the bomb was ready.
THE SUMMER of 1945 was unusually hot and dry on the mesa. Oppenheimer pushed the men in the Tech Area to work longer hours; everyone seemed on edge. Even Miss Warner, isolated as she was down in the valley, noticed a change: “There was tension and accelerated activity on the Hill. . . . Explosions on the Plateau seemed to increase and then to cease.” She observed much more traffic on the road headed south—toward Alamogordo.
Initially, General Groves had opposed the idea of a test of the implosion bomb, on the grounds that plutonium was so scarce that not an ounce should be wasted. Oppenheimer convinced him that a full-scale test was absolutely necessary because of the “incompleteness of our knowledge.” Without a test, he told Groves, “the planning of the use of the gadget over enemy territory will have to be done substantially blindly.”
More than a year earlier, in the spring of 1944, Oppenheimer had spent three days and nights bouncing around the barren, dry valleys of southern New Mexico in a three-quarter-ton Army truck, searching for a suitably isolated stretch of wilderness where the bomb could be safely tested. Accompanying him were Kenneth Bainbridge, an experimental physicist from Harvard, and several Army officers, including the Los Alamos security officer, Capt. Peer de Silva. At night, the men slept in the truck’s flatbed to avoid rattlesnakes. De Silva later remembered Oppenheimer lying in a sleeping bag, gazing up at the stars and reminiscing about his student days at Göttingen. For Oppenheimer, it was a rare opportunity to savor the spartan desert he so loved. Several expeditions later, Bainbridge finally selected a desert site sixty miles northwest of Alamogordo. The Spanish had called the area the Jornada del Muerto—the “Journey of Death.”
Here the Army staked out an area eighteen by twenty-four miles in size, evicted a few ranchers by eminent domain and began building a field laboratory and hardened bunkers from which to observe the first explosion of an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer dubbed the test site “Trinity”—though years later, he wasn’t quite sure why he chose such a name. He remembered vaguely having in mind a John Donne poem that opens with the line “Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . .” But this suggests that he may also have once again been drawing from the Bhagavad-Gita; Hinduism, after all, has its trinity in Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer.
EVERYONE WAS exhausted from working such long hours. Groves called for speed, not perfection. Phil Morrison was told that “a date near August tenth was a mysterious final date which we, who had the technical job of readying the bomb, had to meet at whatever cost in risk or money or good development policy.” (Stalin was expected to enter the Pacific War no later than August 15.) Oppenheimer recalled, “I did suggest to General Groves some changes in the bomb design which would have made more efficient use of the material. . . . He turned them down as jeopardizing the promptness of availability of these bombs.” Groves’ timetable was driven by President Truman’s scheduled meeting with Stalin and Churchill in Potsdam in mid-July. Oppenheimer later testified at his security hearing, “I believe we were under incredible pressure to get it done before the Potsdam meeting and Groves and I bickered for a couple of days.” Groves wanted a tested and usable bomb in Truman’s hands before that conference ended. Earlier that spring, Oppenheimer had agreed to a target date of July 4—but this soon proved to be unrealistic. By the end of June, after further pressure from Groves, Oppenheimer told his people that they were now aiming for Monday, July 16.
Oppenheimer had delegated Ken Bainbridge to supervise preparations at the Trinity site, but he also sent his brother, Frank, to serve as Bainbridge’s chief administrative assistant. To Robert’s delight, Frank had arrived in Los Alamos in late May, leaving Jackie and their five-year-old daughter, Judith, and three-year-old son, Michael, in Berkeley. Frank had spent the early war years working with Lawrence in the Radiation Lab. The FBI and Army intelligence kept a close watch on him, but he seems to have followed Lawrence’s advice and abandoned all political activity.
Frank began camping out at the Trinity site in late May 1945. Conditions were spartan, to say the least. The men slept in tents and toiled in hundred-degree weather. As the target date approached, Frank felt it only prudent to prepare for disaster. “We spent several days finding escape routes through the desert,” he recalled, “and making little maps so everybody could be evacuated.”
On the evening of July 11, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer walked home and said goodbye to Kitty. He told her that if the test was successful, he would get a message to her saying, “You can change the sheets.” For good luck, she gave him a four-leaf clover from their garden.
Two days prior to the scheduled test, Oppenheimer checked into the Hilton Hotel in nearby Albuquerque. Joining him were Vannevar Bush, James Conant and other S-1 officials who flew in from Washington to observe the test. “He was very nervous,” recalled Joseph O. Hirschfelder, a chemist. As if people were not already anxious enough, a last-minute testfiring of the implosion explosives (without the plutonium core) had just indicated that the bomb was likely to be a dud. Everyone began quizzing Kistiakowsky. “Oppenheimer became so emotional,” Kistiakowsky recalled, “that I offered him a month’s salary against ten dollars that our implosion charge would work.” That evening, in an effort to relieve the tension, Oppie recited for Bush a stanza from the Gita that he had translated from the Sanskrit:
In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.
That night Robert slept only four hours; Gen. Thomas Farrell, Groves’ executive officer, who was trying to sleep on a bunk in the next room, heard him coughing miserably hal
f the night. Robert awoke that Sunday, July 15, exhausted and still depressed by the news of the previous day. But as he ate breakfast in the Base Camp mess hall, he received a phone call from Bethe informing him that the dummy implosion test had failed only because of blown circuits in the wiring. There was no reason, Bethe said, why Kistiakowsky’s design on the actual device shouldn’t work. Relieved, Oppenheimer now turned his attention to the weather. That morning the skies over Trinity were clear, but his meteorologist, Jack Hubbard, told him that the winds around the site were picking up. Speaking on the phone to Groves shortly before the general flew in from California for the test, Oppie warned him, “The weather is whimsical.”
In the late afternoon, as thunderclouds moved in, Oppie drove to the Trinity tower for one last look at his “gadget.” Alone, he climbed the tower and inspected his creation, an ugly metal globe studded with detonator plugs. Everything seemed in order, and after surveying the landscape he climbed down, got back into his vehicle and drove over to the McDonald Ranch, where the last of the men who had assembled the gadget were packing up their gear. A violent storm was brewing. Back at Base Camp, Oppie talked with Cyril Smith, one of his senior metallurgists. Oppenheimer did most of the talking, chatting aimlessly about family and life on the mesa. At one point, the conversation turned briefly philosophical. Scanning the darkening horizon, Oppie muttered, “Funny how the mountains always inspire our work.” Smith thought it a moment of calm—quite literally before the gathering storm.
To relieve the tension, some of the scientists organized a betting pool— with a dollar a bet to predict the size of the explosion. Teller characteristically bet high, putting his dollar on 45,000 tons of TNT; Oppenheimer bet low, a very modest 3,000 tons. Rabi staked his money on 20,000 tons. And Fermi alarmed some of the Army guards by taking side bets on whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere.
That night, those few scientists who managed to sleep a bit were awakened by an extraordinary noise. As Frank Oppenheimer recalled, “All the frogs in that area had gathered in a little pond by the camp and copulated and squawked all night long.” Oppenheimer hung out in the Base Camp mess hall, alternately gulping down black coffee and rolling one cigarette after another, and smoking them nervously down to the butt. For a time, he pulled out a copy of Baudelaire and sat quietly reading poetry. By then, the storm was pelting the tin roof with a strong downpour. As lightning flashes pierced the darkness outside, Fermi, fearing that the storm’s winds might drench them with radioactive rain, said he favored a postponement. “There could be a catastrophe,” he warned Oppenheimer.
On the other hand, Oppie’s chief weatherman, Hubbard, assured him that the storm would pass before sunrise. Hubbard recommended postponing the hour of detonation, moving it from 4:00 to 5:00 a.m. An agitated Groves paced the mess hall. Groves disliked Hubbard and thought him “obviously confused and badly rattled”; he had gone so far as to bring along his own Army Air Force meteorologist. Not trusting Hubbard’s assurances, the general was, even so, vigorously opposed to any postponement. At one point, he pulled Oppenheimer aside and listed all the reasons why the test should proceed. Both men knew that everyone was so exhausted that any postponement would have meant delaying the test for at least two or three days. Worried that some of the more cautious scientists might convince Oppie to postpone the test, Groves took him to the control center at South Shelter–10,000 yards. This was less than six miles from the Trinity site.
At 2:30 a.m., the whole test site was being raked by thirty-mile-an-hour winds and severe thundershowers. Still, Jack Hubbard and his small team of forecasters predicted that the storm would clear at dawn. Outside the bunker at South–10,000 yards, Oppenheimer and Groves paced the ground, glancing to the skies every few minutes to see if they could discern a change in the weather. At around 3:00 a.m., they went back inside the bunker and talked. Neither man could stomach a delay. “If we postpone,” Oppenheimer said, “I’ll never get my people up to pitch again.” Groves was even more adamant that the test should proceed. Finally, they announced their decision: They would schedule the shot for 5:30 a.m. and hope for the best. An hour later, the skies began to clear and the wind abated. At 5:10 a.m., the voice of Sam Allison, the Chicago physicist, boomed across a loudspeaker outside the control center, “It is now zero minus twenty minutes.”
RICHARD FEYNMAN was standing twenty miles from the Trinity site when he was handed dark glasses. He decided he wouldn’t see anything through the dark glasses, so instead he climbed into the cab of a truck facing Alamogordo. The truck windshield would protect his eyes from harmful ultraviolet rays, and he’d be able actually to see the flash. Even so, he reflexively ducked when the horizon lit up with a tremendous flash. When he looked up again, he saw a white light changing into yellow and then orange: “A big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it’s a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out, the heat.” A full minute and a half after the explosion, Feynman finally heard an enormous bang, followed by the rumble of man-made thunder.
James Conant had expected a relatively quick flash of light. But the white light so filled the sky that for a moment he thought “something had gone wrong” and the “whole world has gone up in flames.”
Bob Serber was also twenty miles away, lying face down and holding a piece of welder’s glass to his eyes. “Of course,” he wrote later, “just at the moment my arm got tired and I lowered the glass for a second, the bomb went off. I was completely blinded by the flash.” When his vision returned thirty seconds later, he saw a bright violet column rising to 20,000 or 30,000 feet. “I could feel the heat on my face a full twenty miles away.”
Joe Hirschfelder, the chemist assigned to measure the radioactive fallout from the explosion, later described the moment: “All of a sudden, the night turned into day, and it was tremendously bright, the chill turned into warmth; the fireball gradually turned from white to yellow to red as it grew in size and climbed into the sky; after about five seconds the darkness returned but with the sky and the air filled with a purple glow, just as though we were surrounded by an aurora borealis. . . . We stood there in awe as the blast wave picked up chunks of dirt from the desert soil and soon passed us by.”
Frank Oppenheimer was next to his brother when the gadget exploded. Though he was lying on the ground, “the light of the first flash penetrated and came up from the ground through one’s [eye]lids. When one first looked up, one saw the fireball, and then almost immediately afterwards, this unearthly hovering cloud. It was very bright and very purple.” Frank thought, “Maybe it’s going to drift over the area and engulf us.” He hadn’t expected the heat from the flash to be nearly that intense. In a few moments, the thunder of the blast was bouncing back and forth on the distant mountains. “But I think the most terrifying thing,” Frank recalled, “was this really brilliant purple cloud, black with radioactive dust, that hung there, and you had no feeling of whether it would go up or would drift towards you.”
Oppenheimer himself was lying facedown, just outside the control bunker, situated 10,000 yards south of ground zero. As the countdown reached the two-minute mark, he muttered, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.” An Army general watched him closely as the final countdown commenced: “Dr. Oppenheimer . . . grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. . . . For the last few seconds he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted ‘Now!’ and there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief.”
We don’t know, of course, what flashed through Oppie’s mind at this seminal moment. His brother recalled, “I think we just said ‘It worked.’ ”
Afterwards, Rabi caught sight of Robert from a distance. Something about his gait, the easy bearing of a man in command of his destiny, mad
e Rabi’s skin tingle: “I’ll never forget his walk; I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car. . . . his walk was like High Noon . . . this kind of strut. He had done it.”
Later that morning, when William L. Laurence, the New York Times reporter selected by Groves to chronicle the event, approached him for comment, Oppenheimer reportedly described his emotions in pedestrian terms. The effect of the blast, he told Laurence, was “terrifying” and “not entirely undepressing.” After pausing a moment, he added, “Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.”
Oppenheimer later said that at the sight of the unearthly mushroom cloud soaring into the heavens above Point Zero, he recalled lines from the Gita. In a 1965 NBC television documentary, he remembered: “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 Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” One of Robert’s friends, Abraham Pais, once suggested that the quote sounded like one of Oppie’s “priestly exaggerations.”16
