Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [99]
8. To Alamogordo, July 1945
That decisions needed making, that self-delusion seemed necessary, were results of the Manhattan Project’s success in producing a functional atomic bomb. While Truman struggled to find his footing as president, while Byrnes, Groves, and especially Stimson tutored him about the bomb, while the Interim Committee discussed how to use the bomb, and scientists, generals, and government officials debated targets, Oppenheimer’s army in New Mexico labored to solve the bomb’s technical problems and thus fulfill its destiny. Szilard, Franck, and several others thought the bomb should not be used automatically against Japan. Oppenheimer was having none of it. He turned aside Szilard’s provocative petition, and threw himself so fully into the work of finishing the plutonium test bomb that Groves wondered if he would have time for policy meetings in Washington and friends worried about his health. There remained difficulties with the implosion mechanism, the series of detonators that needed to fire simultaneously, ‘within a fraction of a millionth of a second’, if the bomb’s plutonium was to chain react properly. Equally troublesome was the bomb’s gumball-sized initiator (codenamed ‘urchin’), which lay within the plutonium core and would start the release of neutrons. A brave Canadian named Louis Slotin spent his days at a gunmetal desk, pushing toward each other, then quickly separating, two hemispheres of plutonium. He was trying to figure out exactly how much of the volatile element would be needed for the shot. No one had a more dangerous job; ‘tickling the dragon’s tail,’ it was called. (Nearly a year later, Slotin was still tickling. His screwdriver slipped, the hemispheres joined for a split second of criticality, and Slotin, who threw his body over the hemispheres even as he wrenched them apart, died an agonizing, and secret, death nine days later.43)
It was serious and sophisticated work. Preparing the test bomb gave the male scientists a sense of masculine power: they named their bombs Little Boy and Fat Man and planned to label any unsuccessful test device ‘a girl’. The work allowed them to presume to control nature. Nuclear energy was the fundamental force in the universe; to command it ‘in a pint pot’, wrote the physicist Freeman Dyson, was to ‘produce an illusion of illimitable power’. Oppenheimer called the test site (and ultimately the shot itself) Trinity, inspired by the ‘three-person’d God’ of a John Donne sonnet. Preparation for the test was, at times, almost shockingly quotidian. Once the Trinity bomb was under assembly, scientists found several holes in its volatile core, which they plugged with shreds of facial tissue. Some of the bomb’s detonator charges required snugging by means of Scotch tape. The bomb was taken by car and truck to the test site at Alamogordo, 200 miles south of Los Alamos; the core, separated of course from the rest of the assembly, traveled in two suitcases with thermometers attached. As the test gadget was hoisted into a tower, wherein it was to be detonated, technicians threw dozens of army-issue mattresses beneath it, hoping to cushion it if it tore loose from its fittings and plunged to earth. As the bomb lay in place throughout the day and night of 14 July, thunderstorms sparked throughout the area, making the scientists jittery and more than once inspiring them to gallows humor.44
Through the next day and night they figuratively held their breath. Groves fretted about the unstable weather and unhappily contemplated postponing the test. Oppenheimer, agitated, worried that postponement would mean that ‘I’ll never get my people up to pitch again’, as he put it. Vannevar Bush, onsite for the shot, was awakened prematurely when the wind blew down his tent; he gave up on sleep and walked to the makeshift mess hall for breakfast at 3.45 in the morning of 16 July. Men chainsmoked