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had too much to worry about,” O’Donnell explains, remembering Crossroads after more than sixty years. “Is everything all right? Is the bomb going to go off, like planned?” What the twenty-four-year-old weapons engineer was worrying about were the sea creatures in the lagoon. “Let’s say an octopus came into contact with one of the bomb’s wires. What would happen? What if something got knocked out of place?” The wires O’Donnell referred to ran from a concrete bunker on Bikini called the control point and out into the ocean, where they connected to a twenty-three-kiloton atomic bomb code-named Baker. The men in the U.S. Navy’s Task Force One gave the bomb a more colorful name: they called it Helen of Bikini, after the legendary femme fatale for whom so many ancient warriors laid down their lives. A nuclear weapon was both destructive and seductive, the sailors said, just like Helen of Troy had been.

As a leading member of the arming party that would wire and fire the atomic bombs during Operation Crossroads, O’Donnell had a tremendous responsibility, especially for someone so young. “Five years earlier I was just a kid from Boston with a normal life. All I was thinking about for my future was a baseball career,” O’Donnell recalls. In 1941, when O’Donnell was in high school, he’d been recruited by the Boston Braves, thanks to his exceptional .423 batting average. Then came the war, and everything changed. He married Ruth. He joined the Navy, where he learned radio and electronics. In both subjects he quickly excelled. Back in Boston after the war, O’Donnell was mysteriously recruited for a job with Raytheon Production Corporation, a defense contract company cofounded by Vannevar Bush. What exactly the job entailed, O’Donnell did not know when he signed on. The recruiters told him he would find out more details once he was granted a security clearance. “I didn’t know what a security clearance was back then,” O’Donnell recalls. After a month, he learned that he was now part of the Manhattan Project. He was transferred to a small engineering company named for the three MIT professors who ran it: Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier. Later, the company shortened its name to EG&G. There, O’Donnell was trained to wire a nuclear bomb by Herbert Grier, the man who had invented the firing systems for the bombs dropped on Japan.

“The next thing I knew I was asked to go to Bikini in the summer of 1946,” says O’Donnell. “I did not want to go. I’d fought on those atolls during the war. I’d seen bodies of young soldiers floating dead in the water and I swore I’d never go back. But Ruth and I had a baby on the way and she said go, and I did.” He went on, “I missed Ruth. She was pregnant, thank God, but I wondered what she was doing back in Boston where we lived. Was she able to take out the garbage all right?” Forty-two thousand people had gathered on Bikini Atoll to witness Operation Crossroads, and O’Donnell could not sleep because he felt all of those eyes were on him. Thinking about Ruth was how O’Donnell stopped worrying about how well he had wired the bomb.

Elsewhere on Bikini Atoll, Colonel Richard Sully Leghorn cut the figure of a war hero. Handsome and mustached, Leghorn looked just like Clark Gable in It Happened One Night. Commanding officer of Task Force 1.5.2, Leghorn was one of the pilots leading the mission to photograph the nuclear bombs from the air. Leghorn spent afternoons with Navy navigators rehearsing flight paths that, come shot day, would take him within viewing distance of the atomic cloud. At twenty-seven years old, Richard Leghorn was already a public figure. He’d been the young reconnaissance officer who’d taken photographs of the beaches of Normandy on D-day. “In the face of intense fire from some of the strongest anti-aircraft installments in western Europe, Richard Leghorn photographed bridges, rail junctions, airfields and other targets,” the U.S. Army Air Forces was proud to say. Leghorn, a physicist, had a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He loved the scientific concept of photography,