Shockwave

It was an exciting life. She was only twenty-three, but almost everybody seemed to be about the same age. It felt like being on a university campus, a rather beautiful one nestling on top of a mesa up in the mountains above Santa Fe. A very unusual campus too, with its roster of stellar scientific talent and its Nobel Prize winners, some of them living virtually next door. It was said that this brandnew town of 5,000–odd inhabitants had the highest IQ of any city in the world. To Lilli and Don, as to so many of their colleagues, it was a heady place to be. There was a terrific sense of purpose they would remember for the rest of their lives. After all, this was where the war would be won! This was where the dream of infinite power would be realized! This was the future! A secret laboratory above the clouds: how could you not feel excited? Especially when you drove down to Santa Fe for drinks in the La Fonda bar and heard people speaking in hushed tones about that strange, secret place up in the hills, like ancient Greeks describing their gods on Olympus.

There were other wives in other cars up there on Sandia staring out into the darkness. Some of them were listening to the radio, some were dozing or eating or trying to keep warm. But they were all waiting. Most had simply been told by their husbands that something very special was going to happen tonight, something extraordinary and unique, just a hundred miles to the south, and that Sandia Peak was the best place to see it. Many of these wives had moved to Los Alamos years ago, never knowing exactly what their husbands did all day. They had given up their homes, their friends, even their families to be there. They lived in a kind of security vacuum, where nobody outside Los Alamos was ever allowed to visit them, where their address was only a P.O. box, where their letters were censored and their phone calls were tapped, where even their babies were sometimes fingerprinted. It was a heavy sacrifice to sever yourself so completely from the world, especially when your own husband was forbidden to tell you what it was all about. Perhaps that was why so many wives were up here now, watching and waiting for whatever it was that was going to happen out there. Perhaps at last they would learn the truth.

Lilli could see the storm down in the desert was growing bigger. Even on Sandia Peak it was beginning to rain. She had driven all this way for nothing; surely they would never fire tonight. It was now nearly midnight. The best thing was to climb into her sleeping bag and try to sleep. She only hoped her husband, Don, was sitting somewhere warmer and more comfortable than she was.

TWO

Jornada del Muerto Desert, New Mexico

IT WAS A strangely appropriate place to test the world’s first nuclear bomb. A parched land largely inhabited by jackrabbits and rattlesnakes and turkey vultures and a few forlorn ranchers scraping out a living until the bomb makers finally evicted them. Even its old Spanish name was appropriate: the Jornada del Muerto, it was called. The Dead Man’s Journey.

The conquistadores had given the land its name. Four hundred years ago they marched here in search of new pickings in the north. From the surrounding hills, Apache swooped down on them, killing off the stragglers as they trailed, thirsty and exhausted, in the burning sun. In later centuries, the descendants of those same Apache attacked the English-speaking white men who came to deprive them of their territory, torching the wagon trains that rolled down from Santa Fe to El Paso. This was a land that knew violence long before the bomb makers staked their claim to it.

The first detachment of military policemen had moved into the Jornada desert back in September. On horseback and in jeeps, they patrolled the 432-square-mile test site, set up security checkpoints, hunted pronghorn antelope, played polo, and generally lived a life so cut off from the rest of the civilized world that each of them would one day receive a Good Conduct Medal for the lowest rate of venereal disease in the army. The only towns nearby were Troy and Carthage, old coal-mining communities abandoned years ago, their empty, dilapidated streets wasting in the midday heat. The few ranchers who lived here were paid to leave their homes, but some refused until they found their water tanks mysteriously perforated or their cattle accidentally shot in the night. Nobody was ever able to prove the military police were responsible, but the ranchers soon left, never to return.

By the spring the area was beginning to fill with teams of construction workers, road builders, engineers, and scientists. A base camp was built around one of the old homesteads, a drab, dustridden, godforsaken collection of hastily erected barrack huts, where the fire ants ate you alive at night and the brackish water gave you dysentery and the trucks had to be banged with sticks every morning to get the rattlers out. The pace of activity quickened with each day, despite the hundred-degree heat and the dust devils that sprang out of nowhere, not to mention the unpredictable hazards of high-flying bombers, which on two occasions dropped a few practice bombs on the base camp by mistake.

By July 13, two days before Don Hornig climbed up his rainsoaked tower, the operation moved into its highest gear. At three o’clock that afternoon, Philip Morrison, a gifted young nuclear physicist, removed two hemispheres of a strange new metal from a vault in one of the most isolated buildings in Los Alamos. Each hemisphere was nickel-plated and sheathed in glittering gold foil. Accompanied by a guard and a radiologist, Morrison placed them both inside a special two-piece magnesium suitcase fitted with twenty shock-absorbing rubber bumpers. It had taken six months to design that suitcase, an indication of the importance of its contents. Because those golden-wrapped hemispheres of metal were far more valuable than the most precious diamonds on earth. Within the perimeters of a closely guarded, highly secret 428,000-acre industrial site in Hanford, Washington—half the size of the state of Rhode Island—mammoth processing plants had been built simply to produce the metal they were made of. So far, these two hemispheres represented their entire output. The metal itself did not even exist four years previously. It was not found in nature. It was made by man, in a fantastic latter-day alchemy that created new elements by tampering with the most basic units of matter. It was named plutonium, after the god of the dead, and it was the secret heart of the atomic bomb.

Morrison carefully placed the suitcase on the backseat of an olive-drab army sedan and climbed in beside it. A security car filled with armed guards led the way, and the convoy threaded its way down the vertiginous switchback roads that led from the high mesa of the laboratory down toward Santa Fe. As the two cars sped through the sleepy streets of pink adobe houses, Morrison kept thinking how extraordinary it was to be carrying the core of the world’s first atomic bomb, riding next to him in its shock-absorbing suitcase on the backseat of an ordinary car.

It was 150 miles from Los Alamos to the test site, and it took five hours to get there. Two thousand yards southeast of Ground Zero, the cars turned down a dust track toward an undistinguished single-story ranch house. An ancient Chicago Aermotor pump stood forlornly in the yard next to an ugly concrete water tank. A few unkempt outbuildings were scattered nearby, adding to the spent, desolate air of the place. But the views were stupendous, especially now with the lowering sun burning the scalloped contours of the Little Burro mountains and Mockingbird Gap to the south.

Apart from the carbine-carrying guards at the entrance, the ranch was empty. It had recently belonged to a rancher named George McDonald. Nobody told him exactly why he and his family had to give up the home where he had lived for half his life. Neither did they tell him to what use his blue-walled, beige-ceilinged front room was about to be put.

Together, Morrison and a colleague carried the suitcase inside, taking care to obey the summons on the doorstep to PLEASE WIPE YOUR FEET. It was an interestingly domestic touch in an otherwise unsettling scene. Everything else about the room was faintly sinister, as if some secret crime were about to be committed inside. For one thing, all the windows were completely sealed with black masking tape. For another, the room was almost disconcertingly clean, like the inside of a laboratory. Which, in a sense, was exactly what it now was. The suitcase was placed on a table. There it remained, with its two gold-wrapped hemispheres inside, for the night. An armed sentry stood outside, but neither he nor anybody else was permitted to enter. Nothing disturbed the case or its contents until nine o’clock the following morning, when the curtain was raised on a bizarre and extraordinary scene.

Nine men, including Morrison, stood around the table on which the plutonium hemispheres now rested on sheets of brown paper. All the men were wearing white surgical coats. One of Morrison’s colleagues, Robert Bacher, turned to an army general and asked him to sign a receipt for the plutonium, worth at least several millions of dollars. The general, Thomas Farrell, jokingly asked if he could hold it first. He wanted to feel what he was buying. He put on a pair of rubber gloves and picked up one of the hemispheres. It was smooth and heavy, and it felt curiously warm to the touch, as if it were alive.

What Farrell was feeling was radioactivity. The artificially created element was literally breaking down in his hand, the unstable nuclei of its atoms ridding themselves of billions of particles in a bid to regain stability. Some of these particles were able to do something that had once been thought impossible: to smash through the fantastically powerful forces that held the atom’s heart—or nucleus—together. And the reason they could do that was because they had no electrical charge themselves. They were called neutrons, and the electrostatic barrier could not keep them out. Like billions of Trojan horses, they slipped at fantastic speeds through the impregnable gate, sundering the nucleus in two, splitting it apart, fissioning it. And when they did that, they released levels of energy hitherto undreamed of in the history of man.

It was science fiction come true. Just forty years earlier, Einstein had offered to the world his revolutionary equation relating energy and matter. The message of that equation was simply this: that matter and energy were not different things but two expressions of the same thing. Matter could be converted into energy and vice versa. Since 99.8 percent of all the matter in the universe was contained in the nucleus of an atom, theoretically the nucleus was a potential source of incredible and unheard-of amounts of energy. A single gram of water could raise a million-ton weight to the top of Mount Everest. A handful of snow could heat a large apartment building for several months. A breath of air could power an airplane continuously for a year. The trick was to get past that barrier and into the nucleus, split it open, convert as much of it as possible into pure energy. Which is where those Trojan horses came in.

The men who now watched General Farrell weigh the plutonium in his rubber-gloved hands had effectively grabbed Einstein’s equation and made it flesh. They had discovered that a specific amount of the radioactive plutonium would liberate enough neutrons to smash enough atoms to release yet more neutrons, which in turn would smash still more atoms in an unstoppable, exponential, ever-expanding chain reaction. The minimum amount of plutonium required to do that was called the critical mass. Exceed the critical mass, and the chain reaction starts. Less than one-millionth of a second later, you have an atomic explosion.

Farrell signed the receipt and handed the plutonium to Louis Slotin, a young Canadian physicist. Slotin’s job was to assemble the bomb’s core. Hunched in rapt concentration over the ranch house table, he set to work. First he nestled a gleaming grape-sized sphere of polonium and beryllium, called the initiator, inside one of the plutonium hemispheres. The initiator’s function was to kickstart the chain reaction, pouring billions of extra neutrons into the supercritical mass at the requisite time, like fuel into a raging furnace. Next, and with infinite care, he placed the second goldwrapped plutonium hemisphere over the first. Geiger counters clicked away, monitoring the neutron count. Every ear in the room strained for the slightest change in pitch or rate. The operation was extremely delicate. If the plutonium went critical, even for an instant, the result would be lethal. Less than a year later, in May 1946, Slotin himself would experience a massive dose of radiation in a criticality experiment in Los Alamos. It would take him seven days to die. Now he continued: adding the parts one by one like pieces of the world’s most expensive jigsaw puzzle. At some point in the morning Oppenheimer came in to see how the work was proceeding. Quietly he was asked to leave. His nervousness was adding to the tension. Outside, the guards waited with their submachine guns in the baking sun. The temperature climbed into the hundreds. And all the while, in the very place where George McDonald and his family had once had their meals or listened to the radio or read or knitted or snoozed, Slotin and his team constructed the core of an atomic bomb.

It looked like an oversized tennis ball when it was finished. A very heavy tennis ball, weighing just over thirteen pounds. Around the core was the tamper, an eighty-pound hollow cylinder of plumcolored uranium. Together, the plutonium core, the initiator, and the tamper formed the bomb’s heart. Later that afternoon, the whole assembly was carried from George McDonald’s living room in a specially designed, ventilated cage, like some sort of highly dangerous wild animal, before being driven on the backseat of another olive-drab army sedan into the wilderness of sagebrush and Joshua trees to the steel tower. There, it was taken out of its cage and slowly lowered deep into the cool center of a five-foot-wide Duralumin ball of high explosives.

The precise arrangement of those high explosives was so pivotal that some of their secrets remained classified for decades. It had taken a number of the world’s most brilliant chemists two years to work it out. In the end, the explosives were packed around the core in two layers, each containing thirty-two sections. Most of the sections were hexagon-shaped so that the whole assembly fitted together piece by piece like segments of a giant soccer ball. The fit had to be perfect. The slightest air gap could turn the bomb into a dud. To reduce the friction between the explosives they were dusted with the best thing to hand, which happened to be Johnson’s Baby Powder. Scotch tape was used to keep them in alignment. Once detonated, they would send a symmetrically converging shockwave down toward the bomb’s plutonium core, a shockwave so powerful and so perfectly spherical it would literally crush or implode that core, squeezing its billions of atoms into a fantastically dense Ping-Pong ball–sized mass for just long enough to sustain a chain reaction, before the whole thing blew itself apart.

That was the theory, at any rate. Of course, nobody knew if it would actually work. In this titanic bid to outdo nature, perhaps it was nature that would have the last laugh. Or so it began to seem, as the bomb was slowly winched up the one-hundred-foot tower toward the tin shack where, less than thirty-six hours later, Don Hornig would keep his lonely vigil amid the rain and thunder.

THE STORM had been building up in the course of the afternoon, and by sunset the skies west of the test site were heavy and overcast. At first Oppenheimer was philosophical, almost poetic, as he watched the clouds gathering. “Funny,” he said to a colleague, “how the mountains always inspire our work.” By late evening, the poetry had gone. Oppenheimer’s anxiety was now palpable to anyone near him, and his ability to make decisions was beginning to derail. The shot had originally been scheduled for 0400 hours. But this storm brought with it a whole new compendium of difficult decisions. Oppenheimer sat in the base camp canteen, chain-smoking and drinking black coffee and worrying about what to do. Should he fire, should he postpone, or should he scrub? It did not help that half the scientists in the canteen kept offering their own suggestions until Oppenheimer’s head was spinning with paralytic indecision. At the best of times his own nervous constitution was not the strongest. As a young man he was once diagnosed with dementia praecox—a form of schizophrenia—after he tried to strangle his best friend on holiday in France. The cause, it was said, was too much tension.

Nor did it help that Enrico Fermi, one of the world’s greatest physicists, was calmly predicting the possibility that the bomb might set fire to the atmosphere and destroy the world. This was not an entirely novel prediction. A couple of years earlier, another physicist at Los Alamos had mathematically predicted a three in one million chance that this would really happen. It was decided that three in one million was a chance worth taking, and the work continued. Of course at that time there was no physical bomb. But now there was, and it was actually sitting out there on top of a tower in the middle of the New Mexico desert, and the shot time was just a few hours away at four o’clock in the morning, and the man who was making these terrifying predictions was not some apocalyptic religious freak but a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who had overseen the design and construction of the world’s first chainreacting atomic pile. Nor was he a lone voice. Others in that canteen took up the theme. Some even took bets: would the bomb simply destroy humanity, or would it actually destroy the entire planet? “We’ve all had a long and joyful life,” said General Farrell, “and maybe we’ll all go out in a blaze of glory.” “Ah,” said another, eyeing the play of thunder and lightning outside the canteen window, “the earth on the eve of its disintegration.”

Perhaps nobody in that room was quite in his right mind that night, least of all the man at the center of it all. Oppenheimer was teetering on the edge of exhaustion, and this, combined with the fear of a possible Armageddon, was surely enough to drive anybody a little crazy. There he was, with his coffee and his cigarettes, with forty-eight hours of knife-edge anxiety behind him and the toughest decision of his life just ahead of him and everybody pitching in with a hundred suggestions about what to do next, when suddenly a big, beefy two-star general abruptly entered the room. He took one look at Oppenheimer, marched over, grasped him by the arm, and rescued him from the crowd.

The general’s name was Leslie Richard Groves, and he was Oppenheimer’s boss. A commanding, conspicuously overweight figure with a funny little mustache, he was also the most reviled, feared and admired man in the entire atom bomb project, which he ran with ruthless megalomania, like the tyrant of a medieval fiefdom.

THEY COULD NOT have been more different. Oppenheimer was the scion of a wealthy Jewish Manhattan family, a brilliantly precocious, pampered boy who gave his first lecture to the New York Mineralogical Society at the age of twelve and once read all six volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a single transcontinental train journey. An almost extreme example of the polymath, he was an outstanding, if not especially original, scientist, fluent in several languages including Sanskrit, a connoisseur of art, haute cuisine, French medieval literature, European capitals, and poetry. It was Oppenheimer who had given the test its code name, Trinity, after a John Donne Holy Sonnet he had been reading one evening. Like almost everything he said, it was apposite, prescient in its association of unearthly power and regeneration.

Groves, a less imaginative man, could not surpass that, but he did give the bomb program its name—the Manhattan Project, after the location of its original offices. The two men were cast in almost opposite molds. Where Oppenheimer was thin, Groves was fat, and his uniform spread tightly over a not very well concealed paunch. His life was an unequal struggle against his weight, and he spent a large portion of his otherwise very well managed time failing to adhere to strict diets. It was rumored he weighed at least 230 pounds, although the actual figure was a secret almost as highly classified as the atomic bomb. He kept two pounds of chocolate bars in his office safe along with top secret files on the atomic bomb program, and one of his aides was responsible for making sure they were always topped up.

Oppenheimer smoked five packs a day and mixed a famously mean martini. Groves hated smoking and was a virtual teetotaler. Oppenheimer was a scientist, Groves an engineer who loathed scientists, damning them as a bunch of hopelessly impractical leftwing “longhairs” who could not run a faculty meeting efficiently, much less a two-billion-dollar bomb program. He once described Los Alamos as the greatest collection of eggheads ever assembled at enormous expense in one place. Oppenheimer was Jewish, Groves was Presbyterian. One of his army-chaplain father’s enduring legacies was to make him a very productive combination of prude and almost inhuman workaholic, able to suppress almost all bodily requirements (apart from chocolate bars) in the energetic pursuit of his goals. Groves lived a life of blameless domesticity with his wife and two children. Oppenheimer had a Communist mistress who later committed suicide and a wife who was on her fourth husband. A cousin of the Nazi field marshal General Keitel (who was later hanged at Nuremburg), Kitty Oppenheimer was a notoriously tough, highly sexed, hard-drinking woman with a well-plumbed vocabulary of swearwords—“not the kind to serve tea,” as one of Groves’s agents put it.

Oppenheimer was an intellectual who believed in open discussion. Groves was a security freak whose obsession with secrecy reached paranoid levels. He used his position as head of the Manhattan Project to build a private intelligence network so pervasive that not even the FBI could get past the gates of one of his nuclear plants. A senior congressman who tried ended up being interrogated in a windowless room for several hours. Not even Groves’s family had the faintest clue what he did in the office all day. The first time they discovered he had spent the last three years running the biggest and most expensive weapons program in history was the day after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. And they heard it on the radio. He set spies on his sister-in-law, and his agents tapped and tailed and bugged Oppenheimer with almost heroic efficiency. He was so charmless, undiplomatic, and uncompromising that even his deputy, Colonel Nichols, described him as “the biggest sonofabitch I’ve ever met in my life.” Nichols also said he was the most capable.

Groves’s capability was legendary. That was why he was chosen to run the Manhattan Project. A West Pointer right down to his bones, he had joined the prestigious Corps of Engineers, quickly building a reputation for taking on—and completing—projects massive enough to break ordinary mortals. His most recent task before Manhattan was to oversee construction of the Pentagon, then the largest building in the world, and he did it in just sixteen months. He ruled the bomb project’s empire—at one point comprising more than 100,000 men and women—with terrific confidence. He took risks where others quailed, spending enormous amounts of money without hesitation to achieve his ends. An early government committee estimated that the entire bomb-building program would cost $133 million. Groves went through that sum in the first few weeks. And it was not only money he took risks with. Perhaps his choice of Oppenheimer was the best proof of his talents. In brazen defiance of his own security people, he chose to overlook Oppenheimer’s open association with almost every Communist front on the West Coast and make him director of his top secret laboratory. And he did it because he knew Oppenheimer was the right man. He understood better than anybody how Oppenheimer’s need to shine, his craving for recognition, would ensure he kept all those Nobel Prize–winning eggheads on track toward their single goal. It was an inspired decision, and one that perfectly captures the force of his personality. For Groves was the kind of man who crushed any obstacles in his path, who broke, beat, bullied, and smashed his way to the promised land of a workable, deliverable atomic bomb; and woe betide those stupid or vain or arrogant enough to get in his way while he was doing it.