• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 859 0

in splitting the atom, a number of physicists who were present literally ran from the room. The realization was as profound as it was devastating. If scientists could split one atom then surely they would be able to create a chain reaction of splitting atoms—the result of which would be an enormous release of energy. Three months later, the New York Times reported that scientists at a follow-up conference were heard arguing “over the probability of some scientist blowing up a sizable portion of the Earth with a tiny bit of uranium.” This was the terrifying prospect now facing the world. “Science Discovers Real Frankenstein” headlined an article in the Boston Herald that went on to explain that now “an unscrupulous dictator, lusting for conquest, [could] wipe Boston, Worcester and Providence out of existence.” Vannevar Bush disagreed with the popular press. The “real danger” in the discovery of fission, he told Forbes, was not atomic energy itself but the public’s tendency to panic over things they did not understand. To make his point, Bush used the War of the Worlds radio broadcast as an example.

Atomic energy, it turned out, was far more powerful than anything previously made by man. Six years and seven months after the announcement of the discovery of fission, America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, essentially wiping out both of those cities and a quarter of a million people living there. President Roosevelt had appointed Vannevar Bush to lead the group that made the bomb. Bush was the director of the Manhattan Project, the nation’s first true black operation, and he ran it with totalitarian-like control.

When the Japanese Empire surrendered, Vannevar Bush did not rejoice so much as ponder his next move. For eighteen days he watched as Joseph Stalin marched Soviet troops into eastern Asia, positioning his Red Army forces in China, Manchuria, Sakhalin Island, and North Korea. When the fighting finally stopped, Bush’s response had become clear. He would convince President Truman that the Soviet Union could not be trusted. In facing down America’s new enemy, the nation needed even more advanced technologies to fight future wars. The most recent war might have ended, but science needed to stay on the forward march.

As Americans celebrated peace (after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, public opinion polls showed that more than 85 percent of Americans approved of the bombings), Vannevar Bush and members of the War Department began planning to use the atomic bomb again in a live test—a kind of mock nuclear naval battle, which they hoped could take place the following summer in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. There, in a deep lagoon at Bikini Atoll, dozens of captured Japanese and German warships would be blown up using live nuclear bombs. The operation would illustrate to the world just how formidable America’s new weapons were. It would be called Operation Crossroads. As its name implied, the event marked a critical juncture. America was signaling to Russia it was ready to do battle with nuclear bombs.

In less than a year, Operation Crossroads was in full swing on Bikini Atoll, a twenty-five-mile ring of red coral islands encircling a clear, blue lagoon. A July 1946 memo, one of many marked Secret, instructed the men not to swim in the lagoon wearing red bathing trunks. There were barracuda everywhere. Word was that the fanged-tooth fish would attack swimmers without warning.

The natives of Bikini, all 167 of them, were led by a king named Juda, but in July of 1946, none of them were on Bikini Atoll anymore. The U.S. Navy had evacuated the natives to Rongerik Atoll, 125 miles to the east. The upcoming three-bomb atomic test series would make their homeland unsafe for a while, the natives were told. But it was going to help ensure world peace.

On the shores of the atoll, a young man named Alfred O’Donnell lay in his Quonset hut listening to the wind blow and the rain pound against the reinforced sheet-metal roof above him. He was unable to sleep. “The reason was because I