Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [76]
10. A different sort of weapon
Hard work as it was, it was also thrilling. To be among the greatest floating seminar of physicists ever assembled, confronting some of the most fundamental problems of the universe and wedding the solutions to these problems to a device that might end the war, created a magisterial, almost holy feeling. ‘It was the most exciting part of my career,’ recalled Hans Bethe some years later. ‘It was our whole life to make this test work.’ The scientists imagined themselves as Prometheus, stealing fire, or the openers of Pandora’s box, or, in Oppenheimer’s case, the Hindu god Brahma in the epic Mahabharata: ‘I am become Death|The shatterer of worlds.’ They worked, wrote Robert Wilson, with ‘missionary zeal’. As they raced to build a weapon that would bring victory over Fascism, their language reflected their feelings of rectitude about the enterprise and their role in it: they were serving freedom by unlocking the atom’s secrets, ‘liberating’ the energy of the nucleus, or ‘releasing the forces of nature’—there could hardly be anything more natural or noble than that. And it was, after all, ‘superb physics’, as Enrico Fermi liked to say to silence doubters, with an aesthetic beauty, or a ‘technical sweetness’, in Oppie’s phrase. The enchantment with science and technique may also have allowed the physicists to distance themselves from the obvious implications of their work. ‘I don’t believe’, wrote the perceptive Laura Fermi, ‘they had visualized a destruction whose equivalent in tons of TNT they had calculated with utmost accuracy.’
In fact, before they tested the bomb, the men who built it were not entirely sure how powerful it would be. At one point during the summer of 1942 Edward Teller estimated that a bomb might ignite the atmosphere’s nitrogen and thus destroy the world. Oppenheimer, briefly rattled, had rushed off to consult Compton, and the men agreed that, if Teller’s calculus held, the project must end. Hans Bethe ran the numbers again and found the chances of apocalypse to be a mere three in a million. The experiments had resumed. Prior to the test explosion at Alamogordo on 16 July 1945, the scientists famously organized a betting pool, in which each participant was to guess how much blast the shot would generate. The most powerful high-explosive bomb then in use was the British ‘Blockbuster’, which packed the equivalent of 4.6 metric tons of TNT, with a metric ton being about 10 percent heavier than a conventional ton. The pessimist in the pool was Oppenheimer, who guessed 300 tons, while Teller, who had earlier predicted the destruction of the atmosphere, picked highest at 45,000. I. I. Rabi entered the game late, and with few options left took 18,000. Rabi won the pool bet when the Trinity test gadget produced 18.6 kilotons of blast.50
The test atomic bomb would thus deliver an explosion orders of magnitude larger than any weapon previously used. Still, the blast effect of the bomb was measurable on the same scale that was used for what would soon be called, misleadingly, conventional (that is, non-nuclear) weapons. Those who dropped the first two atomic bombs anticipated that the bombs’ explosive effects would be profound yet recognizable. Those whose cities were struck by the bombs, to some extent anyway, would also recognize the explosive effects of the bomb blasts and the fires that followed them: while Hiroshima