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6B Tuesday, July 9, 1985. The Post & Mail, Columbia City, Ind. ^[[7/16/45--'85]] Atomic Age erupted 40 years ago LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (NEA) — It was early morning, July 16, 1945, and the scientists who gathered on the remote Southwest desert were as glum as they were anxious. They were about to introduce a new force in the world, the "forboding unknown" as it was called, and a dadratted summer storm blew in. The storm could, of course, queer everything. The winds presented a safety hazard that wouldn't be tolerated, the rain might soak and ruin sensitive mechanical constructions, and the scientists were thus concerned that the plan to detonate the world's first atomic bomb would have to be scrubbed. "It's all off," one predicted. "Crap." The worry was understandable. And as the nation pauses to remember that morning of 40 years ago, it's clear it was also apropos. The United States labored for a half dozen years to create the nuclear age, and the struggle was so rife with doubt that success was in question from the start. The start was 1939. The world was on the verge of its most horrifying war, the United States would soon be in the fight of its life against three nations, and Albert Einstein, the physicist, told the government it should develop a new weapon that utilized the energy released when atoms are artificially split. That suggestion gave birth to what became known as the Manhattan Project. And the United States committed $2 billion to the plan. The money was distributed to various research laboratories, until, in 1943, the government decided it had learned enough to organize a more concentrated effort to build the bomb. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer was selected to lead the effort. He was a thin, emotionally fragile physicist from the University of California. He collected several thousand scientists and technicians at a one-time boy's ranch near Santa Fe, a mile up the Jemez Mountains, which was to be Los Alamos. It was called "Y Site" then. Everything was code named and secret. The military was running the show. The director of the Manhattan Project, Gen. Leslie Groves, told Oppenheimer that his mission was to create an explosive that would bring World War II to an end, and to do it within two years. The orders were unprecedented. Further, the time frame seemed impossible. One of the first scientists to arrive, Dr. Norris Bradbury, remembers today that Los Alamos was little more than an idea then. There were no roads at the time, nor houses to speak of, and there was only one telephone at the site. Besides this, as Bradbury recalls, the Los Alamos group was not technically ready to make quick history. The state of the art in nuclear physics was that uranium and plutonium were routinely transported in the back seats of passenger cars, and, worse, there wasn't enough available then to build a bomb. For that matter, no one was sure the bomb would work even if it could be built. And some of the most eminent men on the job were haunted by fears of failure. Theorist Hans Bethe debated if the project's principle was correct, and physicist Fred Reines wondered if anybody really knew anything about what they were doing. Even Oppenheimer had doubts. He didn't think the Los Alamos bomb would have a yield much greater than 200 tons of TNT, and he wagered $10 that it wouldn't explode at all. He proposed putting the bomb in an iron casing for the latter eventuality; that way the rare plutonium could at least be salvaged. Not surprisingly, one of the Los Alamos crew put the prevailing gloom to paper. He composed the following ode to lost labor: "From this crude lab that spawned a did, Their necks to (President Harry) Truman's ax uncurled; Lo, the embattled servants stood, And fired the flop heard round the world." The author was clever, but wrong. As it turned out, not even a rainstorm on the desert could stop the events of four decades ago. The test was called "Trinity," the 10,000-pound bomb was placed on a tower at the old Alamogordo bombing range, and the rain lifted just before dawn on detonation day. The blast occurred at 5:30 a.m. local time. The light was said to be the most brilliant produced by man. The temperature was four times that at the center of the sun. The noise could be heard in three states, the shock wave broke glass 200 miles away, the fireball shot 40,000 feet into the air, and the ultimate yield was measured at 23,000 tons of TNT. One frightened military observer thought at first that "the long hairs have let it get away from them." And several scientists also feared the explosion would never end. But the flames soon died, and, prophetically, the streamer of the mushroom could formed the shape of a question mark in the New Mexico morning. Some startled civilians, just rising from bed, thought the blast was the end of the world. A journalist on the scene described it more as the beginning of a new time. Whatever it was, and the verdict is still not in after 40 years, it worked; that's the truly amazing thing, Norris Brandbury says. It worked. [[image - photograph of atomic bomb mushroom cloud]] WORLD'S first nuclear explosion (above) was detonated by the United States on July 16, 1945, at "Trinity" test site in New Mexico. The cloud from the blast, equivalent to 23,000 tons of TNT, rose 40,000 feet. (NEA file photo) ^[[656]] ORGANIZATION FOURTH REPLACEMENT DEPOT APO 703 4 JUL 1946 1945 ^[[Sgt. W. E. Jones 35903979]] NAME RANK ASN is authorized to be absent from his organization from ^[[6800]] hrs 4 JUL 1945 to ^[[2245]] hours 4 JUL 1945 for the purpose of visiting ^[[Tokyo]] ^[[William E. Jones]] Signature of Individual Signed: ^[[H. McCameron]] (COMMANDING) ^[[1st LT. INF 65]] 1 YEN SNACK BAR TOKYO P.X. HATTORI BLDG. 1 YEN 50 SEN SNACK BAR TOKYO P.X. HATTORI BLDG. 50 SEN ^[[183]] IN HIS OWN WORDS WHY I DROPPED THE BOMB BY HARRY S. TRUMAN [[image - photograph of destruction caused by atomic bomb in Nagasaki, Japan]] Devastation in a suburb of Nagasaki, after the dropping of the second A-bomb in 1945. UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos Harry Truman began working on a sequel to his book "Plain Speaking" shortly after he left the White House in 1953. He dictated much of the basic material to secretaries, as well as to Mrs. Truman and his daughter, Margaret. That material has now been shaped by Margaret Truman and Scott Meredith into a forthcoming book. Last April, PARADE carried an installment from the book giving Mr. Truman's personal estimates of the best and worst Presidents in U.S. history. In this excerpt, he recounts the events and thought-processes that led to his "difficult and dreadful" decision to drop the first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945. JUST ABOUT ALL THE FIGHTING IN THE world is caused by the lack of enough to eat, enough to wear, and the lack of a good place to live, but if atomic energy is used the way it ought to be, it can save the whole world from fighting each other to get what's necessary for people to have. It can do unbelievable good for the world, if people can be persuad- [[image - photograph of President Harry S. Truman]] AP/Wide World "If I live to be 100 years old, I'll never forget the day that I was first told about the atomic bomb" ed to get along by looking at examples of the times they didn't get along and were wiped out and destroyed as a result. The same thing can happen now, except this time it will wipe out the whole population of the world if we go to war with this atomic energy we turned loose. I was the President who made the decision to unleash that terrible power, of course, and it was a difficult and dreadful decision to have to make. Some people have the mistaken impression that I made it on my own and in haste and almost on impulse, but it was nothing like that at all. If I live to be 100 years old, I'll never forget the day that I was first told about the atomic bomb. It was about 7:30 p.m. on the evening of April 12, 1945, just hours after Franklin Roosevelt had died at 3:35 p.m., and no more than half an hour after I was sworn in as President at 7:09 p.m. Henry L. Stimson, who was Roosevelt's Secretary of War and then mine, took me aside and reminded me that Roosevelt had authorized PAGE 16 • DECEMBER 4, 1988 • PARADE MAGAZINE ^[[Turn →]] ^[[186]]
