OneManGang
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Author's Note: July 16 is the 62nd anniversary of the TRINITY detonation of the first nuclear device. It is as good a place as any to start a chronicle of the climactic events leading to the surrender of the Empire of Japan and the end of the most deadly war in human history. This series of essays - which will appear over the next three weeks - will attempt to take us back to those days. - Pat (The One Man) Gang
Trinity Monday
A God’s-eye view of the United States in July of 1945 would have revealed a nation truly mobilized for war. On both coasts, shipyards were disgorging vast numbers of sleek warships, fat transports and waddling tankers. Further inland, vast industrial complexes were churning out masses of trucks, jeeps, squat tanks and shiny warplanes. Hundreds of thousands of acres were host to military bases and airfields where millions of young men were being instructed in the deadly arts.
It would have been very easy in this Olympian vision to overlook things with great significance. It would be understandable to pass over factories and facilities located in out-of-the-way places. While apparently quite busy, with thousands of workers and complicated infrastructure these plants seemed to produce …nothing.
The sprawling K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. (National Archives)
It was called the Manhattan Project.
It started with a letter. Three prominent physicists had fled Hungary as war clouds gathered in the late 1930s. They had contacts with colleagues in Nazi Germany and had found that those scientists were busily trying to harness the power of nuclear fission and that research could lead to weapons of unimaginable destructiveness. Upon reaching the United States, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller found that nuclear research, in this country, was very much a cottage industry with only a few physicists devoting themselves to the subject. To beat Hitler at his own game would require much more.
In the summer of 1939 the three men prevailed on their most famous colleague, Albert Einstein, to help them compose and then add his signature to a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt outlining this threat and advocating increased research and development with an eye to creating (if possible) a weapon for the Allies. Unknown to the Hungarians, the Japanese were also doing some research into atomic weaponry as well.
Roosevelt endorsed Einstein’s letter and turned the problem over to the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) a committee of leading individuals in science, industry and government set up to sort through various proposals, decide which were feasible, then oversee the resulting projects. OSRD recommended grants totaling $300,000.00 to begin the process.
By May, 1942, this initial research revealed there were five potential methods of producing adequate enriched Uranium for research and possibly for a weapon. The OSRD compiled a report of their progress to date and submitted it to the President with their recommendation that since no single method seemed the best, the quickest method of producing a usable weapon would be to pursue all five with massive funding and an absolute priority on resources. Roosevelt read the report, took a deep breath and scrawled OK, FDR on the top page.
America was going nuclear.
Overall responsibility for the project, now codenamed MANHATTAN, was given to the U.S. Army under the auspices of Secretary of War Henry Stimson and the Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. Marshall needed a man used to big projects and with a reputation for getting things done to lead the Manhattan Project and he knew just the man. The War Department was moving into the largest enclosed office building in the world in 1942, the Pentagon. In had been completed on time and under budget by a Colonel from the Corps of Engineers named Leslie R. Groves.
Groves was a human bulldozer capable of doing vast amounts of work and had a congenital aversion to delay. Groves knew little of theoretic physics or atomic theory, but he could tell when things were getting done and when the scientists were just arguing minor points among themselves for personal amusement. That latter was strictly verboten.
Groves tapped Dr. Robert Oppenheimer to handle the scientific side of the project while he, Groves, dealt with brick and mortar issues of supply, logistics and construction. The personal contrast between the determined, no-nonsense, bull-necked Groves and the rail-thin, brilliant and diffident Oppenheimer could not have been greater. The important thing was: it worked.
General Groves and Robert Oppenheimer
By mid-1945, the Manhattan Project was the largest scientific research and development enterprise in history. Hundreds of billions of very pre-inflationary dollars had been spent. Huge leaps of scientific knowledge occurred. The atom had been split and now controlled fission reactors operated routinely in places like Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford Washington and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Now, on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer, Groves and a horde of the most brilliant scientists and engineers in the country gathered at a remote spot 50 miles west of Alamagordo, New Mexico to see if all the effort would actually pay off. There were two bomb designs, one using uranium-235 and another, potentially more powerful, using plutonium. There was not enough U-235 to make a test device so that design test would be an operational mission. There was enough plutonium for a test and that would have to do.
The test explosion was codenamed TRINITY.
They gathered in a bunker ten thousand yards from a hundred-foot steel tower with a shed on top. Inside that shed was the subject off all this interest. Looking like an oversized volleyball the test device nicknamed the “Gadget” waited. If this test worked, the circuitry would be condensed, an aerodynamic body would be fitted around an identical sphere in the Pacific, and the world would change – forever.
The “Gadget” in its shack atop the test tower at the TRINITY site.
Dr. Sam Allison, late of the University of Chicago, watched as a timer on the automatic detonation control wound down and gave the count … “Ten … nine …”
The official Army report, submitted by Brig. Gen. Thomas Farrell, gave the details:
“No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggar description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light many times that of the midday sun. … Thirty seconds after the explosion came, first, the air blast pressing hard against people and things, to be followed immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty. … It had to be witnessed to be realized.”
The TRINITY explosion.
Oppenheimer later recalled the effects of the explosion called to mind a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, “I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.”
Fittingly, the vast high desert where the Trinity test took place was known by the name the Spanish Conquistadors had given it centuries before: Journada del Muerto – The Journey of Death.
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