It was a spectacular climax to years of secret scientific research as well as the start of a new era: on July 16 1945 at 5.29,45am, the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated in the south-western desert state of New Mexico.
The scientists who worked undercover and around the clock for two years were well aware of the monumental meaning of their project. Their laboratory complex in Los Alamos, only a few hours away from where the test bomb would explode, was known simply as PO Box 1663.
”All seemed to feel that they had been present at the birth of a new age — The Age of Atomic Energy — and felt their profound responsibility to help in guiding into right channels the tremendous forces which had been unlocked for the first time in
history,” General Thomas Farrell later wrote.
Farrell was one of the 250 or so observers who on that morning witnessed the strange mushroom cloud rising 12km in the air. Farrell lay on his belly in one of three shelters about 9km away from the explosion in the test flight area Alamogordo, also called the White Sands Missile Range.
There was a 20-second countdown.
”Now!” physicist Sam Allison shouted into the microphone. His colleague, Joe McKribben, pushed the button. The detonation, code named ”Trinity”, released a glistening light and a shockwave 40 seconds later that could be felt for 60-kilometres.
Leslie Groves, the military leader of the project, later messaged the US war secretary that even a blind woman who was an eyewitness saw the light. He quoted local newspaper reports.
Farrell described the effects as ”unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying”, noting that no man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before.
”The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun,” he wrote. ”It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.”
Before the detonation, none of the scientists knew exactly what to expect. In the end, scientists measured an explosive force equal to nearly 20 kilotons of dynamite.
The blast ripped a 330m wide, three metre deep crater in the floor of the desert and melted the sand into a greenish glass. To this day, the area remains blocked off as a zone accessible only to the military.
On that July day in 1945, the public was told that a munitions depot had blown up. The truth was released only after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima three weeks later, forcing the Japanese to surrender.
”Trinity” was the result of the highly secret Manhattan Project. In the late 1930s, several scientists who had fled the fascist threat in Europe could not rule out that Germany could use atom-splitting technology discovered in 1938 to build a bomb. They sent Albert Einstein to inform US President Franklin D Roosevelt in August 1939 of the danger.
Without delay, the United States snapped to work on building an atomic bomb. Thirty research labs were pressed into service to participate in the project.
Life behind Los Alamos’ barbed wire wasn’t easy. Contact with the outside world was controlled and letters were censored. Disappearing into the desert for an indefinite time, living under quasi-military control — it unsettled the scientists and their families, Oppenheimer later acknowledged. The area was so secret that the
birth certificates of children born there still only have PO Box 1663 as the location of their birth.
Among the brilliant scientists put to work on the project were Enrico Fermi, Neils Bohr, Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe. Another was German-born Klaus Fuchs, who carried a British passport and was exposed in 1950 as a Soviet spy.
Los Alamos today has 6 000 employees and is one of the leading centres for atomic research. Scientists there remain on the forefront with newly developed computer models that can be used to simulate the results of a terrorist attacks on US cities and help in defending against terrorist attacks, for example.
Security precautions at Los Alamos are extensive. Visitors to the Bradbury Science Museum, which tells the story of Los Alamos, are stopped by police and must show identification. – Sapa-DPA