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and raising the distressing possibility that these might have to be evacuated. Updrafts from the narrow canyons intensified the winds and caused them to blow promiscuously across the area. The small town of Carrizozo was endangered, as were larger communities such as Coyote, Ancho, and Vaughn, 112 miles north of Trinity. A radiation monitor named Joe Hirschfelder drove through the worrisome landscape and returned to Base Camp with radioactive tires and a skin exposure reading so disturbing that he found it impossible to hitch a ride to Albuquerque with nervous colleagues, even after a shower. Several cattle ranches on a mesa west of Carrizozo were contaminated with radioactive ash, a circumstance the government labored to keep secret. Groves’s report to Stimson on the test did not alert the secretary to any potential problem with radioactivity from a bomb blast, though Groves admitted that assessments were not yet final.47

At the site itself, among the scientists especially, reflection and sobriety soon set in. Initial jubilation gave way to a silent breakfast, for those with an appetite. Project director Kenneth Bainbridge shook hands with Oppenheimer and said to him quietly: ‘Now we’re all sons-of-bitches.’ Oppie discovered on the desert floor a turtle struggling on its back, having been overturned by the bomb’s blast wave. Oppie flipped him over and watched him scuttle away; ‘that’s the least I can do,’ he thought. ‘I am sure’, said George Kistiakowsky after the test, ‘that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last men will see what we saw.’ And yet they were at least as sure of something else: that the atomic bomb would prove to be the winning weapon against the Japanese. When Thomas Ferrell saw Groves after the test, the first thing he said was: ‘The war is over.’ ‘Yes,’ replied Groves, ‘after we drop two bombs on Japan.’48

9. Truman at Potsdam

Jubilation trumped reflection in Potsdam, where Truman had arrived on 15 July. Truman had agreed to the summit with reluctance, nervous as he was during his first summer as president that Stalin and, to a lesser extent, Churchill, would outmaneuver or bully him. (‘I’m on my way to the high executioner,’ Truman wrote glumly to his wife, Bess.) He knew that the Trinity test was imminent, and he held out hope for its decisiveness. But he nevertheless came to Potsdam expecting to need the Russians’ help to finish off Japan. And, though it is often forgotten now, and particularly by authors of books about the atomic bomb, Truman not only played the endgame of the Pacific War at Potsdam but confronted a host of issues on which he anticipated Soviet troublemaking: the amount and direction of German reparations, the vexed and ongoing question of the new German-Polish border, and whether the United States and Great Britain would extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet-liberated states of Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, all of which seemed to be falling under Moscow’s control. Japan was much on Truman’s mind as he and his delegation— Byrnes, aide William Leahy, and Soviet expert Charles Bohlen—took up residence in a three-storey yellow stucco building at No. 2 Kaiserstrasse. But the Soviets were in his face.49

Byrnes had excluded Stimson from the entourage, seeking to assert his own control over the President and suspecting that the old man had grown soft. The Secretary of State for all of two weeks, Byrnes had from the start clung fast to the doctrine of unconditional surrender and hoped very much to avoid sharing information with the Soviets about the atomic bomb. Other advisers, including Stimson, who had invited himself to Germany despite his exclusion from the formal delegation, wanted to warn the Japanese explicitly about their imminent destruction, sweetening the threat with a promise that Japan could retain the emperor in a constitutional monarchy if it surrendered. This need not be construed as a shift away from unconditional surrender but a redefinition of it. It was Stimson who brought news of the Trinity test to