Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [89]
It must have been a most interesting time. I was especially fascinated by the museum’s pictures of people having parties, wearing funny hats and holding drinks in their hands, and presumably falling in love in the evenings, while by day they were building the first atom bomb.
‘We weren’t allowed to travel, so we had to have our parties here,’ said Frank. ‘We ate our lunch here in this room. One time I came down and six men sitting around that table started to sing the Hungarian national anthem. So I joined in and sang with them. When we got through singing I went over to talk to some of those fellows and one of them said his name was Edward Teller. He was the father of the hydrogen bomb. He played that piano over there several times to entertain us.’
I found that kind of strange. There was no reason on earth why these people shouldn’t have played the piano or held parties or fallen in love or got drunk, but it still seemed incongruous.
Jack took the picture of the first atom bomb test explosion at the Trinity test site, White Sands, south of Albuquerque, on 16 July 1945. It’s one of the ten most published photographs in the world and I’ve always thought it’s extraordinary – the mushroom cloud billowing in the desert – but Jack told me there’s something wrong with it. He pointed to a print of the famous picture on the wall. ‘It’s facing the wrong way. It was taken on a slide and whoever made that picture turned it over.’ Then he pointed at a whisp of smoke on the right of the picture. ‘That little plume’, he said, ‘should be on the left. It belongs on the other side.’
‘It doesn’t matter much, does it?’ said Frank. ‘I was back at base camp when I took it,’ said Jack, ‘on the south side of everything. So everybody thought that any good picture must have come from the technical staff at the bunker on the north. I’m strictly an amateur; I didn’t have any technical knowledge.’
The night before the explosion, Frank and a group of friends climbed a mountain called South Baldy, the highest peak of the Magdalena Mountains in central New Mexico, and slept at an altitude of ten thousand feet to ensure they would get a good view of the detonation the next morning, but when the appointed hour arrived, they thought the bomb had failed to detonate.
‘We thought it didn’t work,’ said Frank. ‘We knew what time it was supposed to go off in the morning and it didn’t go off. They delayed it because of the weather. So all of my friends crawled back into their sleeping bags, but I was sitting up, watching the sun come up from the other direction. All of a sudden a flash went off and then I heard the sound come in later. All the others woke up and watched it; it was quite an exciting experiment. We looked down at it from above and saw the mushroom building up below us.’
Their stories were extraordinary. What a privilege to have been present at such a momentous event in history, even if there was something quite horrific about it. ‘How did you feel?’ I said. ‘Did it fill you with fear or joy or horror? You must be one of the few people on earth who have watched an atomic explosion for pleasure.’
‘Right,’ said Frank. ‘And unofficially – from a high place.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Jack, ‘there was a lottery going and people bet on the yield that it was going to give. I guessed at about twelve kilotons, which was pretty close, and it was estimated all the way from zero to infinity. There were those who thought it would set the atmosphere on fire and melt the earth.’
I wondered how that person felt when the explosion took place. He probably ran off to hide under his bed somewhere.
‘After the explosion, we came down the mountain to have breakfast in Socorro,’ said Frank. ‘The newspaper already had the headlines out: “Accidental Explosion”. They thought it was an ammunition dump. We knew it was a lie, but they had to publish something because