Shockwave

Up on Compania Hill, twenty miles northwest of Ground Zero, Bill Laurence watched the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller smear suntan lotion over his face and arms. Others were following his example. For the past two years, Teller had been working on what was euphemistically known in Los Alamos as the “Super”: the hydrogen bomb. The sight disturbed Laurence. Perhaps Teller knew something the New York Times reporter did not. It was eerie to see some of the world’s most celebrated scientists wearing sunglasses and rubbing sun cream on themselves in the pitch darkness of the desert night.

Nearby, Richard Feynman had finally managed to get the shortwave radio working for a few minutes. Then it suddenly died again. This time nothing could coax it back into life. But at least everybody up on Compania knew the test was now very close. Laurence was still irritated they had stuck him so far away. From this distance—twenty miles—he would never observe anything useful. He settled himself uncomfortably on the hard ground. One of the project’s scientists called him softly from behind: “Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll see all you need to. We want our chronicler to survive.”

To the left and right of Laurence, all along the ridge, men lay facedown and shivered in the predawn cold. Most of them huddled together, as if for comfort. One man, however, remained apart, sitting alone on a small hillock. He was a curious-looking individual, with his thin, owlish, bespectacled face and bulging forehead. He hardly spoke to anyone, and when he did, it was with a distinctly foreign accent. But everybody knew who he was. In fact, throughout Los Alamos he was renowned: as an enthusiastic three-step waltzer, a jazz lover, an extremely reliable babysitter, as well as one of the most brilliant mathematicians on the project. The one thing nobody knew was that he was also a Soviet spy. His name was Klaus Fuchs, and he had already fed the Soviets information about the program seven times, most recently on June 2, just six weeks ago. Truman and Churchill’s chat this very morning in that sunny Babelsberg drawing room five and a half thousand miles away rested largely on a fantasy. What they agreed to tell or not tell Stalin about the bomb was irrelevant. Thanks to Fuchs, he knew most of it already.

Now Fuchs fixed his welder’s goggles over his eyes and waited to see what he could tell the Russians next.

FIVE MILES above the desert, two B-29 observation planes flew in wide circles, the men on board straining to catch a glimpse of the searchlight at Ground Zero far below. At the height they were flying there was still an overcast, and it was almost impossible to see anything. The lingering aftereffects of the night’s storm had also created a bizarre spectacle. A strange blue fire appeared to burn around the two planes, streaming over the wings and past the windows, leaving a luminous wake in the sky. At times it looked as if the bombers were riding incandescent waves of blue light. It was called Saint Elmo’s fire, and it occasionally happened after a major storm. But to the men on the planes it was still unsettling, especially now, in the final minutes before zero.

One of the observers staring through the windows at the light was Deak Parsons, the balding naval officer who had interviewed the captain of the Indianapolis the day before. An outstanding ballistics expert, he was perhaps the key figure in the development of the bomb as a droppable, deliverable weapon. He was a quiet, serious, technically brilliant man who enjoyed the complete confidence of both Oppenheimer and Groves. So much so that they had entrusted him with a monumental responsibility. In three weeks’ time, he would sit in a B-29 just like this except with one difference: the bomb would be in the bomb bay and not on the ground. It would be Parsons’s job to babysit it all the way to Japan.

Tonight was the dress rehearsal. Parsons needed to see what an atomic explosion looked like from 25,000 feet. As the B-29 slowly descended toward the clouds, he could hear Allison’s countdown over the headphones. It was 0523. The big bomber banked gently to the northeast, still trailing a beautiful blue glow in the sky.

AT ZERO minus five minutes, a short siren blast wailed across the desert. Seconds later, a green rocket flared up into the sky.

Through the loudspeakers, the hollow strains of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings mingled with Sam Allison’s countdown. Voice of America’s early morning classical music show was now in full swing.

All over the Jornada, radiation monitors sat at their shelters or in their trucks, listening to the countdown over the radio. Soldiers detailed to supervise possible evacuations smoked last cigarettes as they waited outside the lonely desert towns. Cameramen and photographers made final adjustments to their equipment, polishing lenses, checking exposures with their flashlights. To the east, over the Little Burros, the faintest gleam of light was now discernible. Dawn was not far away.

Outside the control bunker at S10,000, armed guards sat in jeeps, their motors idling, ready to evacuate the scientists at an instant. Inside the bunker, Don Hornig stared at a control panel in front of him. There were four lights on it. Right now they were all blank. Exactly forty-five seconds before zero, his colleague Joe McKibben would throw the switch closing the automatic timing circuits for the bomb. Once Hornig saw his four lights go red, he would know the X-unit was charged, ready to disgorge its five and a half thousand volts to the bomb’s sixty-four detonators. After that, if anything went wrong, the only way to stop the bomb from blowing up was to cut the power to the X-unit.

Next to Hornig was a knife switch controlling the power. He figured he had perhaps half a second to react if there was a problem. Half a second to abort the world’s first nuclear bomb. It was enough to make anyone a little crazy. He turned to Oppenheimer and made a joke. “What’s likely to happen, Oppie,” he said, “is that at minus five seconds I’ll panic and say—Gentlemen, this can’t go on—and then I’ll pull the switch.”

For a long moment Oppenheimer stared at him. “Are you all right?” he asked.

AT ZERO minus two minutes, the siren wailed again, a slow, stretched howl that seemed to hang forever in the desert air.

At zero minus one minute, a red rocket spat up into the sky. It was 0528.

Philip Morrison, the man who had ferried the bomb’s core all the way from Los Alamos, hunkered down on the ground. The camp looked like a place of the dead. Shadowy bodies lay everywhere, immobile and silent. It felt as if everybody was collectively holding his breath, waiting for whatever it was out there by the tower and the sweeping searchlight to do its worst. Morrison wondered what that worst would be. Tonight it was a test, at best a beautiful, brilliantly conceived scientific experiment. In just a few days, perhaps, it would be the real thing. Morrison was not the only scientist who almost wished the bomb would fail. Like many, he was caught in a trap of desire and horror. The physicist in him wanted to see the experiment succeed. The human in him wanted to see it fail. Sometimes, like Leo Szilard, he even questioned whether it was necessary at all. Now that the threat of a Nazi bomb had disappeared, its purpose was uncertain. The only certainty was that the power they were about to unleash in the next minute would change the world forever.

ON SANDIA PEAK, 110 miles to the north, Lilli Hornig watched the first rays of the sun touch the mountains to the east. The storm had disappeared. It was going to be a lovely day. The test had obviously been scrubbed, she thought. They would only fire in the dark. She dumped her sleeping bag in the trunk of her car, quite forgetting that up here at 10,000 feet the sun rose earlier than it did down on the wide plains below.

FORTY-FIVE seconds before zero, exactly on cue, Joe McKibben pulled the switch triggering the automatic timing sequence. All the circuits to the bomb now closed. Don Hornig stared at his panel, waiting for the four red lights to glow. Right behind stood Kistiakowsky, looking over his shoulder. His entire reputation, not to mention a month’s salary, now rested on whether the troubled X-unit would finally work. Hunched against the racks of equipment to their left was Thomas Farrell, the general who had felt the plutonium core in his rubber gloves two days earlier. A First World War veteran, all he could think of now was how much worse this was than going over the top. Over in base camp, General Groves’s very last thought was what would happen if the countdown got down to zero, and nothing happened.

The red lights on Hornig’s panel flicked on. The X-unit was energized and ready. His eyes were glued to the panel. His hand still rested on the knife switch, waiting for the word to abort. Allison’s countdown passed the ten-second mark. Everybody in the shelter braced himself. Farrell noticed how Oppenheimer scarcely breathed. In the last moment he suddenly grasped a beam, as if to steady himself. Somebody heard him murmur, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.”

And then, in the final seconds before zero, a strange new noise filled the air. Only later would the men who were there learn what it was. It was the noise of frogs, hundreds upon hundreds of them, mating in the dawn. They had come up from the surface after the long night of rain, slipping into the cool, sandy puddles. In the instant before the bomb ripped open the sky, the only sound in the desert was the sound of life in the act of creation.

FIFTY MILES north of Ground Zero, an eighteen-year-old girl was traveling in the front seat of a car next to her brother-in-law, Joe Willis. The girl’s name was Georgia Green, and Joe was driving her to an early-morning music lesson in Albuquerque. They still had some way to go. As they passed the town of Lemitar along an empty Highway 85, a flash of extraordinary brilliance suddenly filled the landscape. Georgia grabbed her brother-in-law’s arm. “What was that?” she cried.

Joe stared at her. Georgia Green was blind.

SEVEN

Monday, July 16, 5:29 A.M. Ground Zero, New Mexico

IT ROSE from the desert like a second sun, a searing, brilliant, expanding ball of fire, and it struck terror into everyone who saw it. In the first millisecond it resembled something horrifyingly alien, a giant, fleshy, brainlike shape with shooting points of fire, and the skies split before it. In that same millisecond, the very instant of its birth, the temperature at its core was 60 million degrees centigrade, ten thousand times hotter than the surface of the sun, and its blinding flash was far brighter. It bathed the mountains and the desert with a beauty and a clarity that nobody who witnessed it would ever forget. Its impact was monstrous and elemental. Within seconds, the brainlike substance had sucked thousands of tons of sand, dust, sagebrush, juniper bushes, rattlesnakes, jackrabbits, mating frogs, bits of pulverized steel tower, and every kind of organic and inorganic matter from the earth’s bowels into a mammoth, rapidly expanding radioactive cloud. It swelled up into the sky, punching through the clouds at 5,000 feet a minute, climbing higher than the highest mountains until it seemed to touch the edge of space. To Bill Laurence, twenty miles away on Compania Hill, it felt as if he were present at the Creation of the universe, the moment when God said, “Let there be light.”

Those who were closer felt the impact of that light much more forcefully. To Isidor Rabi, one of the scientists at base camp thirteen miles away, it blasted, pounced, and bored its way like a drill into the backs of his eyeballs. It was a shocking, painful, visceral sensation he prayed would stop but that seemed to last forever. In fact it lasted two seconds. To Philip Morrison, also at base camp, it felt like a blinding, burning heat, as if somebody had suddenly opened a hot oven inches from his face. To General Farrell, watching even closer from the control bunker, it was stupendous, magnificent, and terrifying, an act of blasphemy in which puny man had dared tamper with the forces of the Almighty. “The long-hairs have let it get away from them,” he yelled, as the fireball mushroomed into the sky. And for a moment it really did seem as if Fermi’s fears had come true and the world was about to end.

Those first few seconds of the atomic age unrolled in an almost eerie silence. But behind the light came the sound, tearing through the desert at twelve miles a minute, and it arrived, as Farrell would remember for the rest of his life, like the roar of doomsday. A million hammer blows struck the Jornada and the Oscura peaks with a noise that numbed the senses like a physical shock and broke windows 120 miles away. The mountain ranges bounced the sound back and forth across the desert and the ground trembled as in an earthquake. To Bill Laurence it sounded like the first cry of a newborn world. Along with the sound came the shockwave, a hundred billion atmospheres of pressure ripping outward from the core like a hurricane, except this hurricane moved initially at several hundred miles per hour, as fast as a modern passenger jet, battering and blasting everything in its path. Even in the concrete, sandbagged control bunker nearly six miles away several observers were knocked to the ground. One of them was Kistiakowsky. He jumped up and slapped Oppenheimer excitedly on the back. “You owe me ten dollars,” he cried. A dazed Oppenheimer pulled out his wallet. “It’s empty,” he replied, “you’ll have to wait.”

At base camp, the blast wave arrived forty seconds after zero. Standing on his mound, Fermi tossed his pieces of paper directly into it, measuring the distance they were carried on the wind. He grabbed a slide rule and rapidly calculated the size of the blast: the equivalent, he found, of 10,000 tons of TNT, almost five times the total weight of bombs dropped on Dresden on the night of its destruction. It was a brilliantly virtuoso guess, but it was also wrong. In fact, the yield was twice as great. It would need 5,000 bombers, each carrying a full load of conventional explosives, to match it. And all this awesome, inhuman power came from a piece of plutonium very slightly larger than a tennis ball.

Don Hornig had rushed out of the control bunker the instant Allison’s count hit zero. As the flash flooded the desert, he tore up the stairs. Then he looked up. The huge, expanding cloud boiled up into the skies almost directly above him like a mountain growing out of the earth. But the most astonishing spectacle was the colors, a glorious riot of luminescent pinks and blues and greens spilling out of the cloud before themselves unfolding whole spectra of new colors, until the sky became one vast and dazzling fireworks display. It was the most beautiful sight Hornig had ever seen in his life.

All over the Jornada, men cheered and shouted and sang as the pyrotechnic wonders raged above them. Others watched in horror. Henry Linschitz, one of the physicists who had designed the bomb’s detonators, stared in disbelief. My God, he said to himself, we’re going to drop that on a city. Normally sober, rational men were seized by an almost animal passion. On Compania Hill, Bill Laurence observed little groups of scientists suddenly dancing with strange, primitive rhythms, clapping their hands and leaping from the ground as if this were some ancient fire festival or rite of spring. Others elsewhere also reverted to primitive instincts. At base camp, General Groves’s first words were, “We must keep this whole thing quiet.” An engineering officer stared at him: “Sir,” he said, “I think they heard the noise in five states.”

In fact all of southern New Mexico, as well as large swaths of Arizona and western Texas, had heard the blast. In Carrizozo, 40 miles away, several people believed they had just experienced an earthquake, as did a forest ranger near Silver City, 125 miles on the other side of the state to the west. The Smithsonian Observatory on Burro Mountain registered a shock, but something about the vibrations was wrong. They were uniquely and inexplicably different from any other earthquake ever recorded. The brilliant light was witnessed as far as 180 miles away. Lilli Hornig saw it as she switched on the ignition in her car on Sandia Peak. She stared openmouthed through the windshield at the floodlit horizon. Ed Lane, an engineer on the Santa Fe Railroad, saw it as he was approaching El Paso, 70 miles to the south. It looked as if the sun had suddenly risen on the wrong side of the earth. Many others who saw it believed that the end of the world had come. Lewis Ferris, a native of Carrizozo, was terrified for a different reason. He ran up and down the streets yelling that the Japanese had invaded.

ON BOARD the B-29 observation plane, Deak Parsons had slipped on his goggles just before zero, when an intense light suddenly filled the sky. The bomber was twenty-five miles from the tower, heading northeast. Within seconds the seven-tenths cloud cover beneath turned a violent orange-red color, as if lit by a giant bulb from the ground. A red ball of fire burst through the undercast, mushrooming into an enormous multicolored cloud. It raced past the bomber’s altitude of 25,000 feet until it reached more than 40,000 feet—eight miles up into the sky. Everybody on board was hollering over the intercom. Parsons, ever the technocrat, began making notes. In the next forty-eight hours he would be leaving for Tinian Island on the other side of the Pacific, the same destination as the USS Indianapolis carrying its lethal cargo. Within days, he would have to brief bomber crews about the awesome spectacle outside the window. It was important he remember it right. The next time he saw anything like this, it would be over a Japanese city.

AS THE CLOUD topped out in the stratosphere, the air around it ionized, leaving a luminous violet afterglow in the sky. From the ground it looked as if the light were filtered through a purple lens stretching across the sky. It was the final curtain call, and like everything else in this drama, it was both beautiful and frightening. After the elation and the excitement, people were now noticeably quieter. Perhaps it was sheer exhaustion. Or perhaps the realities of what they had just seen were beginning to sink in.

Over the eastern mountains, the real sun now began to rise. It seemed to many a pale imitation of the man-made one. Oppenheimer returned by jeep with General Farrell to base camp. Groves was waiting for him. “I’m proud of you,” he said. “Thank you,” Oppenheimer replied. Farrell said the war was over. “Yes,” said Groves, “after we drop two of these bombs on Japan.”

Oppenheimer sent a message to his wife, telling her she could now change the sheets. There would be a party tonight in Los Alamos. His old friend Isidor Rabi watched him as he strode across the camp. Something in Oppenheimer’s bearing chilled his flesh. “I’ll never forget the way he walked,” he said later. “It was like High Noon—I think it’s the best I could describe it—this kind of strut. He’d done it.” Gone was all the fragile self-doubt, replaced by something quite different: the intoxicating certainties of power.

His test director, Kenneth Bainbridge, came up to him, numb and exhausted. He held out his hand. “Oppie,” he said, “now we are all sons of bitches.”

IN POTSDAM, it was 3:30 in the afternoon. With Stalin not expected until tomorrow, Truman decided to do a little sightseeing. Along with Jimmy Byrnes, his secretary of state, and Admiral Leahy, the White House chief of staff, he climbed into the backseat of an open Chrysler convertible and drove off to see the ruins of Berlin.

On the way, he stopped to review the U.S. Second Armored Division. The troops lined the road toward Berlin. Their nickname was “Hell on Wheels,” and they were the biggest armored division in the world. It took the president’s convoy twenty-two minutes to ride from one end to the other. Here was American power at its mightiest and most concrete. “We drove slowly down a mile and a half of good soldiers and some millions of dollars worth of equipment,” he wrote, “which had amply paid its way to Berlin.” The relationship between cost and effect, between cash and power, was one that Truman would not be slow to recognize again.

The presidential party then drove into Berlin. The spectacle that greeted them was awesome and terrible. For more than five years Allied bombs had rained down on the city. In the last weeks of the war, the Russians had poured a never-ending rain of shells and rockets directly into its heart. Four million people had once lived here, and now there was barely a house or building intact. The destruction was literally everywhere. Every wall was savaged with shellfire, every window a gaping hole, every street a smashed litter of craters and rubble and gnarled metal. Nothing grew or flourished except weeds and disease. Truman’s Chrysler slowly edged through a world from which all color had been drained, and with it all hope.

But it was the survivors who affected the president most. From the windows of his car, he gazed at the never-ending processions of broken, dislocated people, refugees in their own city. “We saw old men, old women, young women, children from tots to teens,” he wrote in his diary, “carrying packs, pushing carts, pulling carts … and carrying what they could of their belongings to nowhere in particular.” The spectacle haunted him. This, he said, is what happens when one man overreaches himself. Berlin’s ruin was Hitler’s folly.

The president’s car slowly drove out of the battered city, back to the sunny suburban tranquillity of Babelsberg. The jagged, broken skyline with its hopeless millions receded behind. But the experience hung like a lead weight on Truman’s mind. His diary that night is untypically philosophical. “I hope for some sort of peace,” he wrote. “But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll be a reckoning—who knows?”

He would not have to wait long to find out.

THE FIRST person to enter Ground Zero was a scientist called Herbert Anderson, and he went in a lead-lined Sherman tank weighing twelve tons and carrying its own oxygen supply. It was now 7 A.M., just one and a half hours after the test. As the tank trundled slowly over the desert toward the place where the tower had once stood, the Geiger counters on board went off scale. The tank ground to a halt. Through a heavily shielded periscope, Herbert Anderson stared at the world outside.

A strange, greenish substance glittered in the morning sun on every side. It was smooth and it looked like glass and it stretched out from Ground Zero to a radius of perhaps 400 yards. The sagebrush had entirely vanished. Anderson had never seen anything like it before. He radioed back to base that the area had turned “all green.” In fact it was a bizarre chemical mutation. The thousands of tons of sand sucked up into the fireball had fused into glass before being hurled back on the ground. This alien greenish substance was the result. It surrounded Anderson’s tank like a petrified green sea. Later it was given a name: Trinitite. Like the fireball from which it was created, it was lethally radioactive.

Slowly Anderson panned the periscope across the site. The one hundred-foot steel tower where Don Hornig had spent the night had completely disappeared. The only trace of its existence was its massive concrete stumps, and these had been slammed seven feet into the earth. Half a mile away, another thirty-two-ton, six-story steel tower lay tossed like a child’s plaything on the ground, a smashed and twisted wreck of mangled girders. An enormous crater now surrounded Ground Zero, 1,200 feet in diameter and 25 feet deep. The force of the bomb’s blast had literally hammered the earth open.

Within a mile of Zero every living thing was dead. Every animal, every insect, every tree, every blade of grass. Nothing had survived. With an irony so perfect it seemed almost deliberate, a huge number of the instruments set up to measure the blast had also been destroyed by it. Across the desert they lay smashed and scorched and bent. Most of the cameras that had not been shielded by lead were destroyed. Much of the film had been blackened and fogged by the extreme radiation. And the radiation was everywhere.