Pandora's Keepers (33 page)

Oppenheimer spent the final, harrowing hours before the test with Groves. The physicist seemed to totter on the verge of a
nervous collapse. Groves made an effort to keep him away from the mounting tension in the dugout. Each time that Oppenheimer
seemed on the point of breaking down, Groves would take him out and walk with him in the rain, reassuring him that everything
would be all right. Oppenheimer wanted the test to succeed. Yet just two nights before, in a mood of foreboding, he had recited
to a friend a stanza from the sacred Hindu epic poem the Bhagavad Gita: “In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains
/ On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows / In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame / The good deeds
a man has done before defend him.”

Always thin, Oppenheimer now looked emaciated. Fatigue had worn away his cheeks, and his crystal blue eyes recessed deep in
their sockets, an image of implosion. His voice, dry and scratchy, seemed to cry out for rest, but instead his body was in
constant motion, pacing edgily. He vibrated with tension, his cigarette hand moving to his mouth in tiny jerks. Groves feared
he might come apart at the last minute. Oppenheimer scarcely breathed and held on to a post to steady himself. “Lord, these
affairs are hard on the heart,” he whispered.
⁷⁷

Twenty miles northwest of Zero, Teller stood atop Compañia Hill where he had hiked with a heavy, uneven step because of his
artificial foot to view the long-awaited test. Other scientists who also had been bused in to view the test stood with him
in the dark atop the sandy desert ridge. They talked in groups like guests at a tailgate party. Most had been there all night
and were stiff with cold and waiting. The wind had died down to a still hush before dawn. Now the crowd members grew quiet,
stamping their feet to keep warm.

Although all had been instructed to lie down on the sand and turn their faces away from the blast and bury their heads in
their arms, Teller had no intention of doing so. Suspecting the flash might be even bigger than expected, in the pitch black
of this early morning, he hurriedly smeared suntan lotion on his face and hands. He put on dark glasses and pulled on a pair
of heavy gloves. With both hands, he pressed a piece of dark welder’s glass to his face so that the light would not damage
his eyes. “A hundred-to-one it’s not needed, but what do we know?” he said nervously to those around him.
⁷⁸
Teller then looked straight toward the distant tower.

Bethe moved into position with Teller on Compañia Hill. Bethe had addressed “T” Division personnel the night before in Los
Alamos’ biggest community hall, concluding: “Human calculation indicates that the experiment must succeed. But will nature
act in conformity with our calculations?”
⁷⁹
Bethe and his audience had then boarded buses camouflaged with paint and set off on the four-hour journey through thunderstorms
and hail to Trinity. Like Teller, Bethe now rubbed suntan lotion on his face and hands for protection against damaging ultraviolet
rays from an expected flash twenty miles away. The one-minute warning rocket fired.

Lawrence was also on Compañia Hill, having made the three-hour drive down from Albuquerque in the middle of the night. Lawrence
had wagered other scientists on the test’s success, but his usual assurance was missing. “Our tenseness grew as zero hour
approached,” he wrote later that day.
⁸⁰
Lawrence had planned to watch the shot through the windshield of his olive-drab Plymouth, allowing the tinted glass to filter
out the ultraviolet rays, but at the last minute, as the final countdown began, he decided to get out and look toward distant
Zero with just sunglasses.

Fermi had gazed over the desert the day before “at the world on the eve of its disintegration.”
⁸¹
Now he stood at base camp, making some final calculations on his slide rule. He tore up scraps of paper and stuffed them
into his pockets. A brilliant and methodical physicist with a mordant wit, he had annoyed Groves by offering to take wagers
from other scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world. Whatever the outcome,
Fermi said, the test would be a worthwhile scientific experiment. If the bomb failed, they would have proved that an atomic
explosion was impossible. Some of Fermi’s colleagues interpreted his remark as thoughtless bravado, but to Fermi it was black
satire.

Rabi had spent the night playing poker. Now he stood beside Fermi at base camp. The intermittent lightning and thunder made
Rabi fear that the “gadget” might be set off accidentally. A warning siren, fired one minute before the explosion, signaled
him, Fermi, and others to go into shallow trenches that had been bulldozed below a reservoir at base camp. Rabi lay down,
facing away from Zero. “We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the
east; you could see your neighbor very dimly,” he recalled of the final moments. “Those ten seconds were the longest ten seconds
that I ever experienced.”
⁸²

The nervous announcer brought the countdown to zero with a scream.

PANDORA’S
BOX

A
T
5:29:45
A.M.
Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, just as the first faint signs of dawn appeared above the eastern horizon, a pinprick
of blinding white light materialized atop the tower that spurted upward in a flaming jet. The light, at its core many times
brighter than the midday sun, instantly replaced the sky’s subtle pastels with a blazing flash. It was so intense that it
could be seen in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and even El Paso—180 miles away. The heat at the center of the blast was so great
that six miles away it felt like standing in front of a roaring fireplace. In milliseconds, charges imploding inward had compressed
the plutonium core beyond critical mass, causing it to explode in a furious frenzy of energy-releasing fissions that instantly
vaporized the steel tower.

A white-hot fireball spilled across the desert, kicking up a swirl of radioactive debris that boiled and billowed upward in
a massive mushroom. Every living thing within a mile’s radius was annihilated. The flash left behind shadows of tiny creatures
incinerated in the hard-packed sand. The fireball gouged out a twelve hundred foot crater ranging in depth from ten feet at
the periphery to twenty-five feet in the center. Sand in the crater melted into a jadelike substance the color of emerald.
Fifteen hundred feet away, a stout four-inch iron pipe, sixteen feet high and set in concrete, had completely disappeared.
Slowly the fireball lifted from the desert, a furnace of mammoth, violent, roiling flames. Up it went, a convulsive, quivering
mushroom a mile in diameter, changing colors from gold to purple to violet to gray to blue, expanding, growing and rising
until it touched the clouds, pushed through them, and kept rising higher and higher.

The mushroom stem appeared twisted like a left-hand threaded screw, and below it, the color of the Jornada was an unearthly
green. The whole sky glowed with an intense violet hue for half a minute. Then came a shock wave of hot wind closely followed
by a strong, sustained, awesome roar of thunder. The sound reverberated for miles across the desert, mounting in resonance
as it raced to the very rim of the Jornada’s bowl and ricocheted off the peaks. The ground trembled as in an earthquake.

Across the test site everyone felt infinitely small. The moment was uplifting and crushing, exhilarating and devastating,
full of great promise and great foreboding. The spectacle was so overwhelming that most observers’ first reaction was speechlessness.
No one moved or said a word for several moments. All was silence. They were in awe and at a loss for words. Yet all of them
had the feeling that they had just witnessed one of the great events of history. “It was,” said an eyewitness, “as awesome
a thing as I’ve ever seen.”
¹

Oppenheimer’s face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief as he sensed the flash of light. All his pent-up emotions
and burdens evaporated in that instant. He waited until the blast had passed, then stepped out of the control bunker. He watched
and listened in silence, then simply muttered, “It worked. It worked.” He thought of the immediate future. The success of
the test seemed to signal an end to the war against Japan and a promise of life for many American soldiers. It was “terrifying”
and “not entirely undepressing,” he told the
New York Times
science correspondent who was at Trinity to chronicle the event, adding: “Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life
to it!”
²
But in the next moments he thought of the longer future, which made him feel “extremely solemn.” “We knew the world would
not be the same,” he said of the explosion many years later, then recalled lines from the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying
to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him he takes on his multi-armed form and says, “If the radiance
of a thousand suns / Were to burst forth at once in the sky, / That would be like the splendor / of the Mighty One…. / I am
become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” “I suppose we all thought that, one way or another,” he remembered.

When Oppenheimer returned to base camp shortly after the explosion, he was strangely quiet. He appeared distant and distracted,
not in a frame of mind to discuss anything. Still shaken, Oppenheimer asked to be driven in a jeep into the surrounding hills
for an hour or so in order to calm down. He felt deeply relieved that the bomb had worked—that his creation was a success—and
yet terribly frightened by what he had done.

The other scientists at Trinity shared Oppenheimer’s feelings. The mushroom cloud symbolized a giant question mark to Teller.
Bethe felt overwhelmed by exhilaration and accomplishment. Then he began to feel shock and fear. “What have we done?” he whispered
to himself. “What have we done?”
³
Lawrence reacted by slapping another scientist on the back and leaping in the air. Then he began to feel solemn. “The grand,
indeed almost cataclysmic proportions of the explosion produced a kind of solemnity in everyone’s behaviour,” he wrote later
that day. “There was restrained applause, but more a hushed murmuring bordering on reverence.”
⁴
Deeply moved, Lawrence still could talk of nothing else even two days later. “The awesome spectacle was an experience I shall
never forget.”
⁵

Even the cool and matter-of-fact Fermi felt its emotional impact. At first, Fermi played the scientist, trying to measure
the force of the blast by dropping the scraps of paper from his pocket into the air before, during, and after the shock wave
hit base camp. He was so absorbed in his bits of paper that he did not hear the tremendous noise.
⁶
Then he felt jolted and drained. He confessed that he did not feel capable of sitting behind the wheel of his sand-colored
Chevrolet, and asked a friend to drive him back to Los Alamos—something he had never done before. When his wife saw him, “he
seemed shrunken and aged, made of old parchment, so entirely dried out and browned was he by the desert sun and exhausted
by the ordeal.”
⁷

Rabi felt jubilant at first. He passed around cups of bourbon as a congratulatory offering. Then he began to notice little
things: horses whinnying in fright, the slowly spinning paddle of the windmill above the reservoir, the toads that had stopped
croaking. Rabi felt gooseflesh break out all over him. He sensed, he later wrote, “a chill, which was not the morning cold;
it was a chill that came to one when one thought, as for instance when I thought of my wooden house in Cambridge, and my laboratory
in New York, and of the millions of people living around there, and this power of nature which we had first understood it
to be—well, there it was.”
⁸