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and drank coffee. Enrico Fermi, oddly, tore a piece of paper into scraps. (After the blast, he would use these as primitive but effective indicators of the test bomb’s power.) At 4.45 project meteorologists reported a short break in the storms. Groves and Oppie decided to test Trinity at 5.30. Those witnessing the test got pieces of smoked welder’s glass through which to watch. Richard Feynman, the brilliant trickster, refused to use his, reasoning that at a distance of 20 miles his eyes would be protected sufficiently by the windshield of the truck in which he sat. Edward Teller, on the other hand, put on gloves, a pair of sunglasses under the welder’s glass, and a generous portion of anti-sunburn cream. Samuel Allison, from Chicago’s Met Lab, read the countdown on a radio station that crossed frequencies with another playing a Tchaikovsky serenade, which provided surreal background music for Allison’s steady voice. At 5.29 Allison reached zero. A split second later, ground and heaven burst open.45

Oppenheimer thought of a regnant Brahma from the epic Mahabharata. ‘A foul and awesome display,’ was Kenneth Bainbridge’s verdict. Fermi, seemingly oblivious to the light and heat and shock, dropped his paper scraps and watched as the blast wave carried them. Cocky Richard Feynman turned away, temporarily blinded. Others cheered and danced. The Trinity shot produced a light brighter than any seen previously in the world, bright enough to have been seen from space. Its core temperature was four times greater than that at the center of the sun. The pressure from the blast was unprecedented; the radioactivity it threw off, as Lansing Lamont calculated, was a million times more than that emitted by all the radium on earth. The light, then blast wave, reached Groves, Bush, and Conant, lying side by side and facing away from the tower at a distance of about 16,000 yards. The men shook hands, then Groves said, ‘we must keep this whole thing quiet’. An army major standing nearby tapped Groves on the shoulder: ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I think they heard the noise in five states.’ If not quite that, Trinity nevertheless drew a good deal of attention. An 18-year-old blind woman named Georgia Green, in a car with her brother-in-law on the road to Albuquerque, registered the bomb’s light. Windows broke in Texas, terrified people called police or newspaper offices to report an earthquake or plane crash; a New Mexico man named Hugh McSmith found himself shivering in bed, the sheets and blankets having been blown off him. Groves put it out that an ammunition dump had exploded. In his memorandum to Stimson on the test, Groves included an account written by Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, who had witnessed the blast from the Alamogordo control room 10,000 yards south of the blast site. ‘The effects’, wrote Farrell, ‘could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying.’

The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue.. . Thirty seconds after the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental, and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized.46

As Groves struggled to contain information about the test—a harbinger of American efforts to prevent specific knowledge of the bomb’s works from reaching the international community once the war had ended—he faced a dangerous, related problem. Soon after the shot was fired, Robert Wilson led an observation team north out of Trinity. Needles on the Geiger counters carried by the team members suddenly jumped. Radioactivity, in a reddish-brown cloud, was drifting north, threatening small communities and cattle ranches