Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [93]
Later they remembered having had doubts. Oppenheimer, urbane and self-torturing aficionado of Eastern mysticism, said that as the fireball stretched across three miles of sky (while Feynman was thinking, “Clouds!”) he had thought of a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The test director, Kenneth Bainbridge, supposedly told him, “We are all sons of bitches now.” Rabi, when the hot clouds dissipated, said he felt “a chill, which was not the morning cold; it was a chill that came to one when one thought, as for instance when I thought of my wooden house in Cambridge …” In the actuality of the event, relief and excitement drowned out most such thoughts. Feynman remembered only one man “moping”—his own recruiter to the Manhattan Project, Robert Wilson. Wilson surprised Feynman by saying, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” For most the second thoughts did not come until later. On the scene the scientists, polyglot and unregulation though they seemed to the military staff, shared a patriotic intensity that faded from later accounts. Three weeks after the test, and three days after Hiroshima—on the day, as it happened, of Nagasaki—Feynman used a typewriter to set down his thoughts in a letter to his mother.
We jumped up and down, we screamed, we ran around slapping each other on the backs, shaking hands, congratulating each other… . Everything was perfect but the aim—the next one would be aimed for Japan not New Mexico… . The fellows working for me all gathered in the hall with open mouths, while I told them. They were all proud as hell of what they had done. Maybe we can end the war soon.
The experiment code-named Trinity was the threshold event of an age. It permanently altered the psychology of our species. Its prelude was a proud mastery of science over nature—irreversible. Its sequel was violence and death on a horrible scale. In the minute that the new light spread across that sky, humans became fantastically powerful and fantastically vulnerable. A story told many times becomes a myth, and Trinity became the myth that illuminated the postwar world’s anxiety about the human future and its reckless, short-term approach to life. The images of Trinity—the spindly hundred-foot tower waiting to be vaporized, the jackrabbits found shredded a half-mile from the blast, the desert sand fused to a bright jade-green glaze—came to presage the central horror of an age. We have hindsight. We know what followed: the blooding of the scientists, the loss of innocence—Hiroshima, Dr. Strangelove, throw weights, radwaste, Mutual Assured Destruction. The irony is built in. At first, though, ground zero stood for nothing but what it was, a mirrored surface, mildly radioactive, where earlier had stood a tower of steel. Richard Feynman, still not much more than a boy, wrote, “It is a wonderful sight from the air to see the green area with the crater at the center in the brown desert.”
The Man Comes In with His Briefcase
Thirty months had passed since the closing of the isotron project at Princeton. Feynman and the rest of Wilson’s team had been left in a tense limbo—not knowing. Wilson thought they were like professional soldiers awaiting their next orders. “We became then what I suppose is the worst of all possible things,” he said later, “a research team without a problem, a group with lots of spirit and technique, but nothing to do.