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O’Donnell kept his eyes on the control panel down to the last second, as was his job. In the event of a malfunction, it would be up to him to let the commander know. But the signal had been sent without a problem, and now it was moving down the underwater wires, racing toward the Baker bomb. If O’Donnell moved fast, he could make it onto the ship’s deck in time to see the nuclear blast. Racing out of the control room, he pulled his goggles over his eyes. Up on the ship’s deck he took a deep breath of sea air. There was nothing to see. The world in front of him was pitch-black viewed through the goggles. He stared into the blackness; it was quiet and still. He could have heard a pin drop. He listened to people breathing in the silence. Facing the lagoon, O’Donnell let go of the ship’s railing and walked out farther on the deck. He knew the distance from the button to the bomb and the time it took for the signal to get there. In a matter of seconds, the signal would reach its destination.

There was a blinding flash and things were not black anymore. Then there was a white-orange light that seemed brighter than the sun as the world in front of O’Donnell transformed again, this time to a fiery red. He watched a massive, megaton column of water rise up out of the lagoon. The mushroom cloud began to form. “Monstrous! Terrifying! It kept getting bigger and bigger,” O’Donnell recalls. “It was huge. The cloud. The mushroom cap. Like watching huge petals unfold on a giant flower. Up and out, the petals curled around and came back down under the bottom of the cap of the mushroom cloud.” Next came the wind. O’Donnell says, “I watched the column as it started to bend. My eyes went back to the top of the mushroom cloud where ice was starting to form. The ice fell off and started to float down. Then it all disappeared into the fireball. Watching your first nuclear bomb go off is not something you ever forget.”

Mesmerized by the Baker bomb’s power, O’Donnell stood staring out over the sea from the ship’s deck. He was so overwhelmed by what he’d witnessed, he forgot all about the shock blast that would come his way next. The wave of a nuclear bomb travels at approximately one hundred miles per hour, which means it would reach the ship four minutes after the initial blast. “I forgot to hold on to the rail,” O’Donnell explains. “When the shock wave came it picked me up and threw me ten feet back against the bulkhead.” Lying on the ship’s deck, his body badly bruised, O’Donnell thought to himself: You damn fool! You had been forewarned.

High above the lagoon, Colonel Richard Leghorn piloted his airplane through the bright blue sky. To the south, in the distance, cumulus clouds formed. The U.S. Army Air Forces navigators had sent Leghorn close enough to ground zero to assess what had happened down below on the lagoon, but far enough away so as not to be irradiated by the mushroom cloud. What Leghorn witnessed horrified him. He watched Baker’s underwater fireball produce a hollow column, or chimney, of radioactive water six thousand feet tall, two thousand feet wide, and with walls three hundred feet thick. The warships below were tossed up into the air like bathtub toys. The Japanese battleship Nagato, formerly the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man responsible for planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, was thrown four hundred yards. The retired USS Arkansas, all twenty-seven thousand tons of it, was upended against the water column on its nose. Eight mighty battleships disappeared in the nuclear inferno. Had the armada floating in the lagoon been crewed to capacity, thirty-five thousand sailors would have been vaporized.

From up in the air Colonel Leghorn considered what he was witnessing in the exact moment that the bomb went off. It was not as if Leghorn were a stranger to the violence of war. He had flown more than eighty reconnaissance missions over enemy-controlled territory in Europe, from 1943 to 1945. On D-day, at Normandy, Leghorn made three individual passes over the beachheads in a single-seat airplane