Shockwave

Most of them were centered at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory—MetLab, as it was known—which back in 1942 had built the world’s first chain-reacting atomic pile in the university’s squash courts. Unlike their peers in Los Alamos, they now had less work to do, and consequently more time to think. As the bomb neared completion, the moral case against its use became increasingly urgent. Szilard drove them on. With two of his MetLab colleagues, he attempted in May to persuade Jimmy Byrnes not to go ahead with the weapon—not even to test it. If the Russians knew it worked, he argued, they would throw all their resources into building it themselves. An unlimited arms race would be the result, bringing with it the possible destruction of the human race. Byrnes dismissed his claims. “Rattling the bomb,” Szilard remembered him saying quite openly, would make Russia “more manageable.” Szilard tried again: in June he sat on a committee chaired by another Chicago scientist, James Franck, to explore the bomb’s social and political implications. Their concluding report proposed that—at the very least—the weapon be demonstrated “before the eyes of the representatives of all the United Nations on the desert or a barren island.” The report was sent to Stimson’s office. His assistant, George Harrison, took care of it. The evidence suggests that Stimson himself never saw it. “We waited and waited,” said one of its authors, Eugene Rabinowitch, “and we had the feeling we could as well have dropped it into Lake Michigan.” So Szilard tried yet another tack: he attempted to persuade Oppenheimer to join his crusade. Oppenheimer turned him down. “The atom bomb is shit,” he said. “It will make a bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.” It was an astonishing remark. Perhaps Oppenheimer was simply less prophetic than Szilard. Perhaps he was blinded by the intellectual challenge of actually building an atomic bomb—what he once called a “technically sweet problem.” Or perhaps he was seduced by the trappings of power and his own ambition. He preferred, in the end, to remain king of his own castle, confirming the recommendations of Stimson’s Interim Committee that the bomb be used directly and without demonstration against Japan. Szilard’s case was lost before he even started it.

But still he did not stop. Now constantly tailed by Groves’s agents—his phones were tapped, his letters read, his every movement watched and recorded—he threw all his energies into one final effort: to make a direct appeal to the president himself. Once again he pleaded that the bomb not be used. His words resonate with frightening prescience. “A nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction,” he wrote, “may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.” He had collected sixty-nine signatures—most of MetLab’s leading physicists, and some of its biologists and chemists—when Oppenheimer and Groves were waiting for Jack Hubbard’s final weather report in Trinity’s base camp. The era of devastation was only a few hours away, but Leo Szilard was by now so distrusted that he was not even allowed to know today was the day.

FIVE

Monday, July 16, 2:08 A.M. Base Camp, Trinity Test Site

BY THE TIME Hubbard arrived at base camp for his 2 A.M. meeting, he was eight minutes late. He was also drenched. The full force of the storm had just hit the camp. Within seconds, the rain had churned the dust into viscous pools of black mud. He was barely out of his jeep before Groves immediately tore into him. “What the hell is wrong with the weather?” were his first words, as if it were all Hubbard’s fault. He demanded a specific time when the test could go ahead. Hubbard began to explain the meteorological processes behind the storm. Groves abruptly cut him off. He hadn’t asked for explanations, he said; he’d asked for a specific time. Hubbard argued he was trying to give him both. He believed the storm would collapse with the first rays of the sun. The weather should be clear by dawn. By now, Groves’s blood was up. Even Oppenheimer—himself hardly a model of philosophic calm—tried to pacify him. Hubbard was convinced Groves was going to call off the test altogether. But he did not. Instead he ordered Hubbard to sign his own forecast. “You’d better be right on this,” Groves told him, “or I will hang you.”

A few minutes later, Groves phoned the governor of New Mexico, rousing him from a deep sleep. As always, he was blunt. He told the governor he might have to declare martial law during the night. Forcible evacuations could well be necessary throughout the state. The two men had discussed this possibility a few weeks previously. Then it seemed remote. Now the dangers were all too real. If the shot went ahead, nobody could predict the outcome. Bleary-eyed and half-awake, the governor knew better than to argue. Groves was running this show.

He was, after all, in his element. This was what he did best. Despite the pressures he was under, he did not break. He was able to make decisions when everybody else around him, including the director of his laboratory, was unable to do so. In a curious way, it was almost as if he reveled in this moment—Leslie R. Groves’s finest hour, when the fate of the world rested on his shoulders. In this hour, he could bludgeon governors of states and move whole communities from one end of New Mexico to another. Groves was never afraid of power, and just now his power was arguably greater than that of any man alive. His fingers were in every pie—scientific, political, and military—and over the next three weeks they would stretch across the world: from this wilderness in deepest New Mexico, to Potsdam in war-battered Germany, and finally all the way to Japan.

He was powerful, but he was also careful. Perhaps regrettably in Groves’s view, America still had a free press. He was acutely aware of the potential public relations disaster now hanging directly over his head. In just a few hours, half of New Mexico might go up in smoke, taking with it a number of the world’s leading scientists. Not even Groves could put the lid on that story. It was essential to be prepared. And typically, he was. Sitting in his Foggy Bottom safe back in Washington, along with the classified documents and the chocolate bars, were four different press releases covering four different outcomes to the test. A reporter attached to his staff had prepared them as far back as May, two months earlier. Each described an accident in which a remotely located ammunition dump had blown up by mistake. They went all the way from this:

Several inquiries have been received concerning a heavy explosion which occurred on the Alamagordo Air Base reservation this morning. A remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosive exploded. The cause is as yet unknown but an official investigation is now proceeding. There was no loss of life nor injury to anyone and the property damage outside of the explosives magazine itself was negligible.

To this:

The premature explosion of material intended for use as an improved war weapon resulted today in the death of several persons on the reservation, including some of the scientists engaged in the test.

Among the dead were:

(Names)

As is normally the case with considerable amounts of high explosive, the effects were noticeable for several miles.

Of course, there was also another possibility: that the bomb failed to go off at all. It was a fear Groves lived with every day of his life. He even joked about it from time to time, in one of those jokes that was not entirely funny. “If the gadget proves to be a dud,” he told a colleague in the days running up to Trinity, “I will spend my life so far back in a Fort Leavenworth dungeon they’ll have to pump sunlight in.”

TWENTY MILES northwest of Ground Zero, up on Compania Hill, the reporter who wrote those press releases sat in a bus and watched the rain dripping down the windows. His name was William L. Laurence, and he was here to write up the biggest story of his career. Just two days ago, on July 14, Laurence had arrived at Los Alamos on the final stage of his journey to Trinity. From there he mailed a letter to his editor at the New York Times. “The story,” he wrote, “is much bigger than I could imagine. When it breaks, it will be an eighth-day wonder, a sort of Second Coming of Christ yarn. It will need about twenty columns on the day it breaks.”

Laurence was another of Groves’s finds. A tough, pugnacious, tirelessly energetic journalist with a thick Slavic accent and a jutting chin, he was virtually a one-man incarnation of the American Dream. He had come to the United States from Lithuania in 1905 as a penniless refugee, worked his way through Harvard Law School by teaching the sons of the rich, and had since become one of the country’s most brilliant and successful science reporters. With one Pulitzer Prize already behind him, he turned his attention, in September 1940, to the revolutionary new science of atomic physics. The result was an article for the Saturday Evening Post with the innocuous title, “The Atom Gives Up.” It was an astonishingly prescient piece. In a few choice paragraphs, it predicted a world in which the almost limitless possibilities of atomic power might be harnessed for man’s benefit—or his destruction.

At the time, nobody appeared to pay the article any attention. It simply disappeared into oblivion. Only later did Laurence discover that the FBI had pulled that particular edition of the Saturday Evening Post out of every library across the United States. And they did not stop there. They also investigated every individual who asked to see it. The long arm of what was to become the Manhattan Project already ran the length and breadth of the country. It was only a matter of time before its spotlight finally turned on the author. Laurence knew too much. He was far too dangerous to leave outside the nuclear fold. So they brought him inside, to work for them. And the man who made that decision was General Groves.

By then, Bill Laurence was working for the New York Times as a science reporter. Groves made an appointment to meet the managing editor, Edwin L. James. For extra clout, he brought his chief of intelligence and counterintelligence along with him. As always, he was direct. He told James the project needed Laurence and it needed him for several months. He also said Laurence would continue on the Times payroll for security reasons and that stories should occasionally appear under his byline to suggest he was still actually writing for the paper. Groves did not state any of this as an offer. There was no appeal. Laurence, in effect, was to be requisitioned.

It was an inspired choice. Laurence’s selection suited everybody. He turned out to be the most dedicated apologist of nuclear power the Manhattan Project could ever have wished for. His zeal for atoms was positively messianic. He was never happier than when describing all those cosmic fires that man’s genius would spread over the face of the earth. On a more mundane level, he was also perfectly happy to draft as many press releases as Groves could throw at him. Months before the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Laurence had written the draft presidential statement to be released to the press immediately after that event. Almost the only word left blank was the one he did not yet know: the name of the city.

Laurence’s choice was also good news for the New York Times. They were guaranteed the scoop of the century, even though they had no clue what would be revealed. On May 17, 1945, Laurence had written a top secret three-page memo to General Groves entitled “Plans for Future Articles on Manhattan District Project.” All of these would of course be “subject to approval,” by which Laurence presumably did not mean the approval of his editors at the New York Times. There were twenty-nine articles listed, and they ranged from subjects like the early history of the Manhattan Project to an eyewitness account of the first combat use of a nuclear weapon. This last was a little premature since the first test bomb was still two months away from demonstration, but Groves had agreed in principle. Laurence would certainly get to ride one of the missions to Japan and witness firsthand just what his dream atomic power could do to a real city.

By the time of the test, a significant number of these articles were already written and filed away in Groves’s safe. Now, as he sat in the bus on Compania Hill, Laurence began to take notes. It was 2:30 in the morning. To the southeast, twenty miles away, he could see a single searchlight flashing in the sky. He knew what that was: Ground Zero.

A shortwave radio linked Compania Hill to base camp, but it kept shorting out. One of Los Alamos’s most brilliant physicists, Richard Feynman, was trying to fix it with the help of a flashlight. Until or unless he succeeded, none of the scientists up there had any idea when—or if—the bomb would fire. Laurence fumed silently in the shelter of the bus. If only they had allowed him to get closer. Twenty miles—he was too far away. Even if the thing went off, he would never see it properly. He was out of the loop. The thought that he might miss the biggest scoop of his career was enough to drive him mad. After all, hadn’t Groves read that memo properly? It was all there, in black and white. Item number 23: “An eyewitness account (in case eyewitness survives) of the first test with bombs.” He had even written his own obituary.

SOMETIME IN the night, Don Hornig finally got his telephone call. It was his boss Kistiakowsky, telling Hornig he could come down at last. Gratefully, Hornig shut his unread thriller, stood up, and squeezed past the bomb. He stepped onto the top rung of the ladder. The steel tower dropped beneath him in the rain, its wet girders and cables gleaming in the powerful beams of the searchlight Bill Laurence also saw from his bus window. He looked back at the bomb for the last time. There it sat, inert, cold, quiet, skulking in the darkness of its tin home. Hornig turned away, and began to descend.

At the bottom he climbed into a jeep, huddling under the canvas cover as protection against the rain. Cold and wet, he raced off through the sagebrush, back to the warmth and coffee and companionship of the base camp mess, where Fermi and his fellowscientists were still taking bets on whether the bomb up there would destroy the earth in the final minutes before dawn.

SIX

Monday, July 16, early hours of the morning Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, San Francisco Bay

TWELVE HUNDRED miles northwest of Ground Zero, in the predawn darkness of one of the United States’ largest naval bases, two army trucks drove onto a wharf and pulled up alongside the USS Indianapolis, a heavy cruiser. A team of heavily armed marines jumped down and took up position around them, weapons held ready. The flaps at the backs of the trucks were opened. From the decks above, sailors stared down. Loading operations did not normally take place at this time of the night. Whatever was in those trucks was obviously very unusual.

From the first truck, a wooden crate emerged. It was big, perhaps five feet high, five feet wide, and fifteen feet long. A gantry crane on board the Indianapolis secured it, then lifted it up into the night sky. Once over the ship’s side, it was carefully set down in the hangar ordinarily used for observation planes. Some of the sailors took guesses what was inside it. The running bets were on toilet rolls for General MacArthur. Or maybe Rita Hayworth’s underwear.

The crate attracted all the attention. Almost nobody noticed the object that emerged from the second truck. It was hardly worth comment: just a bucket-shaped cylinder less than two feet high and eighteen inches in diameter. The only odd thing was that two sailors were needed to carry it. It was suspended from a crowbar on their shoulders, and it was obviously very heavy. Two army officers followed them up the gangplank onto the ship. There was something a little odd about them too. They were dressed in artillery uniform, but they appeared to be wearing their insignia upside down.

The two officers followed the sailors and the bucket into the flag lieutenant’s cabin, where it was welded to the floor. The sailors then left. One of the officers removed an instrument from his valise and held it next to the bucket. It began clicking slowly and regularly, like a heartbeat.

The ship’s captain, Charles Butler McVay, waited on the bridge. In a little over six hours, he was due to depart. Everything about this mission unnerved McVay. Only the day before, he had been abruptly summoned to Admiral William Purnell’s headquarters in San Francisco. The admiral had introduced him to a lean, balding navy captain in his forties called William “Deak” Parsons. The two men came straight to the point. They ordered McVay to prepare his ship immediately for a highly secret mission. He was to sail at maximum speed across the Pacific. His destination was Tinian Island, a tiny speck in the ocean 1,500 miles south of Japan. The ship would travel alone and without escort. It would also carry two pieces of very special cargo.

McVay was not told what the cargo was. He was simply informed that it was more important than anything else on his ship, including the lives of its men. If the ship went down, the first lifeboat went to the cargo. He was also told that every day he saved on the trip would cut the length of the war by just that much. Then he was dismissed.

As McVay now waited on the bridge, one of the artillery officers with the upside-down insignia climbed up. He told McVay that the bucket was secure. He also said it was padlocked, and that he would keep the only key. McVay studied him a moment. “I didn’t think we were going to use bacteriological weapons in this war,” he said. The officer made no reply. Then he left the bridge.

In New Mexico, the time was 3 A.M. General Groves had just threatened to hang Jack Hubbard. Don Hornig was sitting down over coffee and powdered eggs in the base camp canteen. The final pieces were locking into place for the test of the world’s first atomic bomb. But in Hunter’s Point naval base, a very different drama was taking place. In these quiet, dark hours before dawn, preparations were rapidly moving ahead for the world’s second atomic bomb. The one they would drop on a city.

The two men with the upside-down insignia sitting over their bucket in the flag lieutenant’s cabin were not artillery officers at all. Their names were James Nolan and Robert Furman, and they were working for Groves. The big wooden crate sitting in the Indianapolis’s hangar did not contain toilet rolls or underwear. It contained a key component for that bomb, a specially designed high-velocity cannon weighing half a ton. The lead-lined bucket welded to the deck of the two men’s cabin did not contain bacteriological agents. It contained approximately half of the 141 pounds of weapons-grade uranium that would explode over Hiroshima in three weeks’ time.

With less than three hours to go before the first bomb was tested, the second bomb was already on its way.

AT 0400 THE WINDS at Ground Zero began to veer in the direction Jack Hubbard had been praying for: to the northeast. The rains also eased, and the thick clouds scudding overhead at last began to break. The weather was not perfect, but for Hubbard it was acceptable. No doubt he could feel General Groves’s noose hanging over his head. At 0445 he discussed his findings with Kenneth Bainbridge, the test director. After a hurried telephone conference with Groves and Oppenheimer, the final decision was made. Zero hour was set for 0530, just half an hour away. The test was on.

In the concrete control bunker five and a half miles south of Ground Zero named S10,000, Bainbridge inserted a key into a padlocked metal box. Inside were switches for the bomb’s arming and timing circuits. One by one Bainbridge flipped them on. The final switch controlled the bomb’s firing circuit. From here, cables snaked back through the miles of sagebrush to the tower, then up the steel girders to the tin hut until they reached Don Hornig’s X-unit bolted to the rear of the bomb. Bainbridge flicked the switch on, closing the circuit. The electrical pathway to the X-unit was now clear. The bomb was armed.

The control bunker at S10,000 was a small room, just twenty feet by twenty feet, but each square foot was crammed with instruments, dials, oscilloscopes, gauges, cables, knobs, boxes, panels, racks of fuses, half-eaten sandwiches, and empty coffee mugs scattered in haphazard confusion on desks, tables, even on the floor. Despite the electrical equipment there were puddles from the rain everywhere. With all this paraphernalia, there was almost no room for the dozen or so scientists. In one corner, Hornig and Bainbridge squeezed together over their apparatus. In another, Kistiakowsky sat hunched at a table over his dials. Oppenheimer stood by the door, a thin, fragile, exhausted figure, looking up at the sky. Although there was still some mist in the west, the skies to the east were now clearing rapidly. The winds were light and gentle. It was even possible to see a few stars.

The time was now 0510. In a tiny cubicle to the side of the bunker, a middle-aged man sat holding a microphone. His name was Sam Allison, and his role was about to become one of the most important in this test. In a moment, he would begin the twentyminute countdown toward zero. For the last time he checked his watch. Just a few days ago, his wife had collected it from a repair shop in Santa Fe. The watch had sentimental value for Allison. His wife knew he wanted it urgently. He did not tell her why.

Allison switched on the microphone. Outside, the loudspeakers hissed into life. He began to count. Suddenly his voice was drowned by the deafening strains of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Radio KCBA, broadcasting from Delano, California, had just begun its morning Voice of America show. Somehow its wavelength had crossed with Trinity’s. It was too late to do anything about it now. As the scientists, guards, and radiation monitors huddled in their bunkers to the north, west, and south of Ground Zero, Allison’s voice and the National Anthem echoed in strange harmony across the lonely desert. Meanwhile in California, KCBA’s listeners would spend the next twenty minutes hearing a man counting backward.

AT BASE CAMP, General Groves watched the single searchlight playing on the northern horizon. He and Oppenheimer had already agreed to witness the test from separate positions. The program might survive the death of either one of them. It could not survive both. Not far from Groves was Philip Morrison, the man who had carried the bomb’s plutonium core in its shock-absorbing suitcase all the way from Los Alamos. Now he was busy relaying Allison’s countdown to base camp from a sound truck. For a moment he stopped, reaching down to pull his socks up and trouser legs down as far as they would go. He wanted to be sure no part of his skin was directly exposed to whatever the bomb out there threw into the sky—or, more precisely, at him. He knew that 360 highly radioactive isotopes of plutonium would be created at the instant of fission. He also knew the potential hazards of ultraviolet light traveling directly toward him at 186,000 miles per second. The trousers and socks may not have been much, but they were better than nothing.

All around Morrison, men were now burrowing themselves into trenches. Most of them had brought along welder’s goggles or pieces of strongly tinted glass. Everyone had been advised to lie facedown away from Ground Zero and not look up when the bomb exploded. The light was sure to be brilliant, but nobody could be sure just how brilliant. One man chose to ignore this advice. Enrico Fermi was standing on a mound to get a better view. Now he was rapidly tearing up pieces of paper and making swift calculations on his slide rule. He smiled at Herb Anderson, a fellow scientist. “Just watch,” he said. “I’ll know the yield before anyone.”