Shockwave

But Reiko was beautiful. Sunao remembered the first moment he had seen her, earlier that summer by the Ota River. She was sitting on a bridge with a party of other girls, and she was laughing. He was very shy. Perhaps there was something about his shyness that appealed to her. Or perhaps she liked him because there were so few healthy young men still left in the city. They talked for hours, and he told her about himself and his life as an engineering student in the city. He was twenty and she was younger, only just out of school. Her movements were full of grace, and years later he would remember there was something in her voice and her smile that was like a breath of summer. They saw each other all through that hot July. They went to the shrine at Miyajima. They picnicked in the hills overlooking the city. They even went to one of the few movie theaters still open in the commercial district, going separately so they would not be spotted. And they went to the Shukkeien Garden. Sometimes she sent him letters with just the faintest whiff of scent, a luxury in those times of war. But they never kissed. They never even touched. Until that final night.

She had cried when he told her. Of course it was inevitable. He was young, and the war wanted him. Time had run out for both of them. He would be in the army by September, only a few short weeks away. She was inconsolable. She was sure he would die, like all the other young men who had been called up. Everybody knew the Americans were planning an invasion. It was only months or even weeks away. Okinawa, the last Japanese bastion before the home islands, had fallen in June. The battles would be fierce and desperate. She was convinced Sunao would be dead before the end of the year.

They lay together on the grass and she cried, and for the very first time they touched hands. He would never forget that. It was the only time they ever touched. After a while she stopped crying. They spoke little. But their hands never left each other. At some point in the evening there was an air raid alert, but still they did not move. There were often alerts these days, as the Americans passed north over the city. They flew high in their silver planes, sometimes so high that in daylight all you could see was a brilliant white trail in the blue sky. But they took their bombs elsewhere.

A little after midnight the lovers parted. They said good-bye at the gate. Reiko walked away down the street. Sunao watched her go, until she disappeared around a corner. She never looked back. Then he turned slowly toward his home, the memory of her touch still fresh in his mind. Afterward, he would remember this as the happiest night of his life.

He looked up at the sky. The stars were clear and brilliant. Tomorrow was going to be a beautiful day.

ACT I THREE WEEKS EARLIER DRESS REHEARSAL JULY 15–16, 1945

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

JOHN DONNE, “Holy Sonnet XIV”

Now we are all sons of bitches.

KENNETH BAINBRIDGE,

director of the Trinity test, July 16, 1945

ONE

Sunday, July 15, 9 P.M. Trinity Test Site, Forty Miles South of Socorro, New Mexico

DON HORNIG stared up at the tower. The wind and rain whipped through the steel latticework. The storm that had been building throughout the day had finally erupted in all its fury. Flashes of lightning lit the San Andres mountains to the south, and the desert echoed with the growl of thunder. The tower loomed 103 feet above Hornig’s head, a network of black braces and girders reaching upward like a giant electric pylon. By now the clouds were racing so low across the sky, he could barely see the top. Which was just as well, really. He did not want to think about what was at the top.

He began to climb. The wet steel slipped between his fingers and the rain stung his eyes, making it difficult to see. He wore no safety harness. Rung by rung, he pulled himself up the ladder. It was slow going, but he was only twenty-four, and the long Sunday rides over the Pajarito mountain trails near Los Alamos kept him fit. Once or twice he stopped, and he could see the guards below him looking up, like ants on the desert floor. They seemed a long way down.

At the top of the tower, a simple corrugated tin shack rested on a square wooden platform. It was a flimsy, cheaply made structure, obviously not designed to last. It was not much bigger than a garden shed. One of its walls was open to the elements. Hornig stepped off the ladder beside it, pausing by the entrance. A huge, dimly discernible shape crouched inside. There was a bare sixty-watt bulb hanging from the roof. Hornig switched it on and peered inside.

Hulking on a cradle was a metallic-gray, bloated, four-ton steel drum, and it took up almost every inch of space in the shack. Even by day it would have looked ominous, but it looked especially so now with the wind whipping the tin walls, and the dim bulb swaying from the ceiling, and the lightning and thunder edging nearer. A fantastic complex of cables sprouted from its sides like a spillage of guts or arteries, as if it were somehow not inert at all but actually organic, a growing, living, autonomous embryo, awaiting the moment of its birth. Perhaps in acknowledgment of its essence, its creators had even given it a name. A number of names, in fact. They called it The Beast, The Gadget, The Thing, The Device. Sometimes they just called it It. The one thing nobody ever called it was what it actually was. The world’s first atomic bomb.

Hornig squeezed down beside it. The rain pelted on the tin roof like a thousand hammer blows. The wind rattled the thin walls of the bomb’s cage. In a few hours, a fellow scientist named Joe McKibben, standing in a concrete bunker exactly 10,000 yards to the south of this tower, would initiate the final act in what was almost certainly the biggest and most expensive scientific experiment in history. McKibben would press a switch on a panel that in turn would close an automatic timing circuit and begin a forty-fivesecond countdown. At the end of that time a number of different things could happen. The bomb could fail to go off. Or it could detonate with varying magnitudes of explosion. Or, as one Nobel Prize–winning scientist believed possible, it could set fire to the earth’s atmosphere, in the process destroying all life on the planet. The difficulty was that nobody knew.

The only other object in the tin shack, besides an atomic bomb, was a telephone. It was Hornig’s sole means of communication with the outside world. The lines ran down the tower and out through the desert to the control bunker. They were supposed to call him when it was time to come down, and he was supposed to call them if anything went wrong. That was the theory, at any rate. In practice, if anything did go wrong, there might not be much time to start making phone calls.

He had not asked for this job. It was a last-minute decision, made only a couple of hours earlier by the director of the bomb’s laboratory, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was worried about pretty much everything that night, but right then one of his main concerns was security. He wanted somebody to go up there, babysit the bomb, keep a watchful eye on things. Maybe Hornig was unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he was an obvious choice. A brilliant Harvard-trained chemist, he had spent the early war years in New England researching underwater explosives. One day in 1943 his boss had called him into the office and told him he was wanted for a job so secret, not even his boss had a clue what it was. Within days, Hornig had sold his beautiful forty-five-foot yacht Siesta, bought himself a secondhand 1937 Ford Coupe, and together with his twenty-year-old wife, Lilli, an equally brilliant German Jewish refugee whom he had met in a chemistry course at Harvard, headed out west. Their destination was a place he had never heard of. It was called Los Alamos, a secret laboratory in the high mesas northwest of Santa Fe, where they were building very special bombs.

Over the next two years, Hornig designed a wondrously complex piece of equipment called the X-unit. Essentially the bomb’s electric trigger, it would, at the requisite time, send a five-and-a-half-thousand-volt charge to sixty-four detonators arranged in geometric patterns around the bomb’s sphere, like cloves stuck in an apple. Of course, if anything went wrong with the X-unit, there would be no firing charge, no detonation, no explosion. With a two-billion-dollar investment underwriting the project, not to mention the possible fate of the war in the Pacific, this was clearly not an option. Which is why young Don Hornig now found himself sitting all alone on top of a tower in the middle of a violent electrical storm, next to an atomic bomb.

There were clearly ample opportunities here for a little philosophical speculation, but Hornig chose not to indulge. Instead, he started to read a book. It was a cheap paperback thriller called Desert Island Decameron. It was not, he remembers, a very good book. Of course, it was hard to read in the dim sixty-watt light. Plus his concentration skills were not quite up to their usual levels. After all, Hornig knew perhaps better than anyone that a well-placed lightning strike could perform precisely the same function as one of his X-units. It could quite easily set off the detonators, in turn igniting the 5,300 pounds of Comp B and Baratol high explosive surrounding the nuclear core of the bomb. Even if the bomb failed to go nuclear, the high explosive alone made it the biggest conventional weapon of the war. It was quite powerful enough to destroy Hornig, his book, the tower, the guards standing at the base, not to mention a sizable lump of New Mexico real estate.

It did not help that a trial X-unit had already been set off by atmospheric disturbance from a passing cloud just two days previously, instantly discharging its five-and-a-half-thousand-volt firing signal. Fortunately, Hornig survived that time because there was no bomb on the end of it. Nor was it helpful to recall the time he and Lilli were once actually struck by lightning, out in the plains of eastern New Mexico in a place called Tucumcari, as they traveled out west in their Ford Coupe toward Los Alamos. Now it almost felt like a portent, as if some pernicious spirit were determined to end Hornig’s bomb-making career as it had started: with a bang, but the wrong sort of bang. Under the circumstances, he figured it was better to stop thinking of the one-hundred-foot tower standing in the middle of the desert as a giant lightning rod. Far better to think of the rain pouring down the steel frame as an efficient earthing device, carrying any million-volt charge benignly into the ground. After all, if he was right, there was nothing to worry about. And if he was wrong, he would never know it.

In the meantime, Don Hornig and the bomb remained up there together on the tower, while he tried to read his book and waited for the phone to ring, and the thunder and lightning crashed all around him. And out in the concrete bunkers, 10,000 yards to the north and west and south, the men who had spent the last three years designing and building this bomb prayed for the weather to improve. Radiating out from the steel tower was the most elaborate complex of instruments ever devised for a single scientific experiment. There were crusher gauges, geophones, seismographs, gamma sentinels, peak pressure gauges, piezoelectric gauges, sulfur threshold detectors, impulse meters, ionization chambers, and a hundred other kind of instruments, and they hid in the ground or poked through the sagebrush or peeked from behind the mesquite trees. There were twenty-five miles of newly built blacktopped roads, and hundreds of telephone poles carrying 500 miles of cables in every direction. There were the three concrete bunkers to the north, south, and west of the tower, and lead-lined photographic bunkers housing batteries of cameras, some of them mounted on army air force machine-gun turrets. There was a radar unit to track the fireball and four high-speed Mitchell 35mm motion picture cameras to film it in slow motion and innumerable spectrographs to record its radiation. It was an astonishing array of hardware, and it stretched out over this half-forgotten chunk of ancient Apache territory between the Rio Grande to the west and the Oscura mountains to the east, a vastly intricate spider’s web at whose center was that lonely steel tower with its tin shack and its bomb and Don Hornig sitting on top with his paperback.

The tower was the focal point, the hub of man’s first attempt to dabble with the very guts of creation, unleashing new, monstrous fires over the earth. Everything led back to it. Everywhere was locked into its destiny. Not only here in this remote New Mexico plain but across the world: to Washington, to the shattered heart of Europe, to the war-ravaged islands of the Pacific, and finally to two cities in Japan and a young couple touching hands in a tea garden.

Perhaps the bomb makers understood all this when they gave the tower’s site its name. They called it Ground Zero.

FIVE AND A HALF thousand miles away, President Truman was just finishing breakfast on a sunlit porch in the sleepy Berlin suburb of Babelsberg. The weather was perfect, a beautiful, still July morning. Dressed in a polka-dotted bow tie and natty two-tone summer shoes, Truman cut an almost holidaylike appearance, a smart American tourist on a European vacation. But he was not a tourist, and this was no vacation. The president was here for the start of one of the most important conferences of the war. Beginning tomorrow, he would drive from the Little White House—in fact a yellow stucco three-story building which served as his headquarters—to join Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill around a circular table at the Cecilienhof, a cavernous, mock-Tudor, early twentieth-century palace in nearby Potsdam. Together, these three men—the Big Three—would thrash out the shape of the postwar world. They would also determine the fate of Japan.

The war with Germany had already been over for two months, but this final struggle with Japan was proving hugely difficult and costly. Over the past three years American troops had battled their way, island by island, across the Pacific toward the enemy heartland. British and Commonwealth troops had fought bitterly in the dense jungles of Burma in Southeast Asia. The slaughter was horrific on all sides. The Japanese fought tenaciously, bravely, and determinedly. Their culture regarded surrender as a disgrace and death in battle as the ultimate honor. The result was terrible destruction. Only two weeks earlier, on June 30, the island of Okinawa, just 400 miles southwest of Japan, had finally capitulated after three months of vicious, often hand-to-hand combat. The casualty figures spoke brutal truths: at least 12,000 Americans and 107,000 Japanese soldiers killed. The island was defended with ferocious tenacity. Offshore, thousands of kamikaze pilots slammed their planes into American ships, exploding over their decks: 30 vessels were sent to the bottom of the sea, a further 164 damaged. And then there were the civilians: perhaps as many as 100,000 Japanese and Okinawans who died, some caught in the crossfire, some pressed into the fighting, some entombing themselves in the island’s caves. Most of the population had been warned by their leaders of the atrocities they would suffer if captured. To the horror of the advancing Americans, whole families preferred to leap off the cliffs, parents often clutching their children, rather than fall into enemy hands.

Okinawa was the last Japanese outpost before the home islands. The battle was still raging when Truman met his Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House on June 18 to discuss the invasion of Japan itself. His decision was to commit U.S. forces to a massive assault on Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, beginning on November 1, 1945. The operation was code-named Olympic. It was to be followed four months later by Coronet, a second invasion, on the plains near Tokyo. More than three quarters of a million Americans would be involved in Olympic. They would face at least 350,000 enemy troops. The number of Americans expected to die in the operation was a figure that has caused controversy ever since. At the White House meeting, General George Marshall, the Chief of Staff, estimated that 31,000 men would be killed or wounded in the first thirty days of the assault. The course of casualties after that was almost impossible to predict. Perhaps the only certainty was that the Japanese would fight as they had always fought: with everything they had, right up to the bitter end. Unless, of course, the atomic bomb stopped them from fighting at all.

Truman understood this perfectly well as he sat at his breakfast on the Little White House porch. But he understood more. Part of him was dreading this conference. He saw himself as an unknown next to world-class leaders like Stalin and Churchill, a second-rater who had become president only because of Roosevelt’s death back in April. But this flat-footed former railroad worker who had spent part of his boyhood castrating pigs on the family farm had also inherited the bomb. He had, as his secretary of war Henry Stimson explicitly pointed out, a master card up his sleeve, even a royal flush. And its potential benefits were massive. The bomb could alter everything. It could offer a way out of the war with Japan, it could offer a handle against Stalin’s expanding empire, perhaps most of all it could offer an all-powerful weapon in the new game of atomic diplomacy. It could, in effect, turn the Big Three into the Big One—or perhaps the Big One and a Half, with a grateful Churchill trailing at Truman’s apron strings. There was only one question: would it work?

It was a two-billion-dollar gamble. Truman had even deliberately postponed the start of the conference to coincide with the Trinity test. The shot had to go ahead now, today, while Stalin, who was afraid of flying, slowly made his way in his heavily armored train toward Berlin. The president of the United States himself had set the deadline, and time was running out.

SINCE THE MOMENT he had said good-bye to his wife, Kitty, three days earlier, J. Robert Oppenheimer had become an increasingly nervous wreck. His weight was down to a mere 114 pounds, and his crumpled suit hung limply on his tall, cadaverous frame. His face

was equally gaunt, and heavy bags weighed down his blue eyes. Despite doping himself up to the gills on Seconal, he had barely slept for days. A sizable portion of his time was now spent downing gallons of black coffee and smoking endless cigarettes with short, sharp, almost manic puffs. He coughed almost continuously, a thick, heavy, nicotine-filled cough. He was just forty-one years old, but he looked a decade older, an exhausted, fragile, brilliant man facing the greatest challenge of his life.

The pressure he faced was hideous. As the director of the Los Alamos laboratory, he was personally responsible for the test actually succeeding. And so far, despite the most rigorous rehearsal schedule imaginable, plenty had already gone wrong. Even before this mother of all storms hit the ground.

Kitty’s last gesture had been to give him a four-leaf clover, but she might as well have given him a thornbush for all the help it gave. The two of them had also agreed on a special code: if the test were successful, he would send a message telling her she could change the sheets. The likelihood of the sheets ever being changed was now looking remote. A miscellany of cock-ups littered the past fortyeight hours. For instance, there was the case of the bomb’s detonators that had very nearly never made it to the test. Four days ago, on July 11, Kenneth Greisen, a young Cornell explosives expert, had packed 200 detonators in the trunk of his car in Los Alamos, driven off toward the test site, and promptly got himself stopped by a traffic cop near Albuquerque for speeding. By grace or good fortune, the cop did not look in the trunk. Had he done so, it is unlikely either Greisen or his 200 detonators would ever have made it in time for the test.

Then there was that problem with Don Hornig’s X-unit, gaily firing off its thousands of volts after electrical discharge from a passing cloud. Or the failure in the last twenty-four hours of yet another trial X-unit that simply refused to function, its circuits blown to bits. Oppenheimer really laid into Hornig over that one, until it became clear the unit had been tested over and over again, literally hundreds of times, when it was only ever designed to be used once or twice. That may have temporarily calmed Oppenheimer down, but whichever way you looked at it, the X-unit was almost perniciously unreliable, disgorging its thousands of volts when it was not supposed to and stubbornly refusing to do so when it was. And who knew just how it would behave in a few hours’ time?

Nor was that the end of the problems. There was the moment when the bomb was being winched up the tower toward the tin shack and it suddenly slipped, nearly falling fifty feet onto a pile of mattresses beneath. As if they would have helped. Perhaps most worrying of all was the Creutz fiasco, a dress-rehearsal test named after the physicist Edward Creutz in which an exact replica of the test bomb, minus its nuclear core, was exploded in a remote Los Alamos canyon just two days previously. The purpose here was to confirm that the high-explosive assembly surrounding the bomb’s core would work properly. Unfortunately the test failed completely, meaning that the four-ton Gadget now sitting primly on top of its tower at enormous taxpayers’ expense would very likely also fail, thereby damning the entire operation to absolute and predictable meltdown. This sent Oppenheimer into a meltdown of his own, and he poured out all his fear, anger, and venom on Don Hornig’s colorful Ukrainian boss, George Kistiakowsky, who had designed the high-explosive assembly in the first place. As a man who had once fought against the Red Army across 2,000 miles of hostile Russian steppe, Kistiakowsky was not the sort to back down under this kind of onslaught. He immediately bet Oppenheimer a month’s salary against ten dollars that his explosives would work. It is a sign of Oppenheimer’s state of mind that he took the bet.

The next day—less than twenty-four hours before the real test—a physicist called Hans Bethe phoned from Los Alamos to say that the Creutz calculations were erroneous, since the instruments measuring the test were incorrectly set up in the first place. This was something of a mixed blessing. All it meant was that the Creutz experiment was neither a failure nor a success. The bomb might work, but then again it might not. The net result of all this was just the same in that it had Oppenheimer reaching with trembling fingers for yet another of his industrial-strength cigarettes.

And now of course he was facing this terrible storm.

ONE HUNDRED TEN miles north of Ground Zero, Lilli Hornig parked her husband’s 1937 Ford Coupe by the roadside and switched off the engine. She gazed through the windshield into the night. In daylight the view up here on Sandia Peak was magnificent, a limitless panorama of desert and mountains. Lilli knew it well. Sometimes, when the strain at Los Alamos grew too much, she and Don would drive up here and sit in their car 10,000 feet up, with half of southern New Mexico unrolling to the horizon.

But tonight there was almost nothing to see. The lights of a few remote towns spread beneath her, isolated pinpricks in the darkness. Far away in the distance, lightning flashed over the mountains. There was a big storm brewing that way. It was more than a hundred miles off, too far for the sound to reach her. She wondered if Don were anywhere near it.

It was cold up here in the thin evening air. Lilli settled back in her seat and spread a blanket over her knees. She was glad she had brought something to eat. It was going to be a long night. Unlike many of the wives, she knew all about the test. As a highly trained chemist, she was among the privileged in Los Alamos, one of the scientific elect, and she shared in many of its secrets. Her coveted pass gave her access past the armed guards and the electrified wire fences and automatic alarms into the Tech Area, the collection of hastily erected wooden buildings and muddy footpaths that was the laboratory’s heart. In one of those buildings she spent her days working on the purification of a strange, newly created element called plutonium. In the evenings she and Don often sat down to dinner with their scientific colleagues and talked into the night. Sometimes on the weekends they went riding, out into the cool poplar trails from which Los Alamos took its name, or up into the Pajarito mountains. And sometimes they would drive here to Sandia Peak where Lilli sat now in her car, looking out into the night.