[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 115 (Monday, July 17, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10082-S10085]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE NUCLEAR AGE'S BLINDING DAWN
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, 50 years ago yesterday, July 16, 1945,
the course of human history was changed forever.
President Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin were
preparing for the European peace conference to end the war with Hitler
and the Axis. There were major questions to be answered. Where would
the conference by held? The war in the Pacific was still raging; would
Russia enter into the war against Japan?
And, then, we learned about the events at Los Alamos, NM. We did not
know that we had just succeeded in the greatest scientific race of all
time, let alone the unquestionable magnitude of this achievement that
would end the Second World War. Until this time, the activities at Los
Alamos were shrouded in complete secrecy.
As recounted in several superb articles in New Mexico newspapers, the
activities at Los Alamos changed the lives of New Mexicans as much as
they impacted upon the rest of the world.
During the early morning of July 16, 1945, some of the citizens in
New Mexico witnessed a sudden illumination in the sky. A friend of mine
Rowena Baca, was quoted as saying that her ``grandmother thought it was
the end of the world.'' This shocking irradiation incited Mrs. Baca's
grandmother to shove her, as well as her cousin, under the bed. From
underneath the bed, the two children saw the walls and ceiling reflect
a red color. They were 35 miles from the Trinity sight, where the
explosion occurred.
Dolly Oscuro's ranch used to include the land that became the Trinity
sight. Where the cattle grazed, Mrs. Oscuro remembers looking out her
window and seeing a rising mushroom cloud.
Helen and William Wrye, also ranchers, were returning home from a
long and exhausting trip. They live in the same house that is 20 miles
from the Trinity sight. They slept through the explosion. The
radiation, according to Mr. Wrye, caused his beard to quit growing for
a while. Of course, we are not sure that was the case, but at least
that is what he perceives.
Mr. friend, Larry Calloway, who writes for the Albuquerque Journal,
wrote what is in my opinion an articulate, well-documented, and human
perspective of the first successfully tested atomic bomb. The article,
``The Nuclear Age's Blinding Dawn,'' describes in detail the events of
the night and morning leading up to this first display of atomic power.
Mr. Calloway's article portrays the human side of this historic day:
about people such as Joe McKibben who wired the instruments that set
off the implosion bomb; Berlyn Brizner who served as chief
photographer; and Jack Aeby, a civilian technician who assisted in
placing the radiation detectors--just to name a few.
``The Nuclear Age's Blinding Dawn'' is worthy reading for all
Americans. Many times, the specific event in history overshadows the
individuals who made the event possible. Mr. Calloway tells us about
the people in New Mexico who made this historic achievement happen.
Fifty years later, in hindsight, debate continues on the issue of
whether development and deployment of the atomic bomb was the right
thing to do. For example, a Smithsonian exhibit featuring the Enola
Gay, the plane that dropped ``Little Boy'' on Hiroshima, becomes
controversial. It is probably fair to suggest that the debate will rage
for another 50 years. However, many believe that their work associated
with this effort was right.
On this anniversary, let's turn to other aspects of this event. Our
entrance into the Nuclear Age is as much about people as it is about
science. It is the well known people: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico
Fermi, I.I. Rabi, Niels Bohr, Hans Bethe, Luis Alvarez, Emilio Segre,
Norman Ramsey, Val Fitch, Aage Bohr, A.H. Compton, E.O. Lawrence, and
James Chadwick, and Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, to mention a few.
It is about the citizens of New Mexico who witnessed the Trinity
test.
And, it is about the unsung workers and scientists at Los Alamos who
were
[[Page S 10083]]
important players in this enormous discovery. They were not alone. They
were joined by many thousands in the State of Tennessee at Oak Ridge
and other scientific locations around America. Together they performed
their duties for a cause they believed in. The employees of New
Mexico's national laboratories continue this legacy today.
In honor of these men and women, let us acknowledge their countless
contributions since that time. Let us give appreciation for their
dedication and commitment. These are the people who changed the course
of human history.
I respectfully ask unanimous consent that the text of Mr. Calloway's
``The Nuclear Age's Blinding Dawn,'' Fritz Thompson's article ``Locals
Had Ringside Seat to History,'' and Patrick Armijo's article, ``A-Bomb
Scientists Bear No Regrets'' be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
The Nuclear Age's Blinding Dawn
(A half-century ago on July 16, the United States detonated
the first atomic bomb. The test, code named Trinity, was the
conclusion of the Manhattan Project to build the bomb in a
frantic race with Adolf Hitler's scientists. The explosion
ushered in the nuclear age, gave rise to New Mexico's modern
economy, led to Japan's surrender and set off 50 years of
debate about the morality of using such awesome force.)
(By Larry Calloway)
For Joe McKibben, the Nuclear Age came in the back door
without knocking. For Jack Aeby, it slipped blindingly
through a crack in his welder's goggles. For Berlyn Brixner,
it rose in dead silence like an awesome new desert sun.
After 50 years, they are among the few who remain to tell
about the test of the first atomic bomb, made in the secret
wartime city of Los Alamos and code named Trinity by lab
director J. Robert Oppenheimer. The survivors are among the
dwindling few on Earth who have seen any nuclear explosion.
It's been 32 years since the last U.S. atmospheric test.
On that Monday, July 16, 1945, at 5:10 a.m., the senatorial
voice of physicist Sam Allison began what's now called a
countdown. ``Minus 20 minutes'' boomed over the loudspeakers
and shortwave radios in the dark Jornada del Muerto in New
Mexico's dry Tularosa Basin.
By space-age standards, it was a very short countdown, but
it was probably the first in the about-to-be-born world of
big science. ``Sam seemed to think it was,'' McKibben says.
``He told me, `I think I'm the first person to count
backward.' ''
Just as Allison is remembered for the Trinity countdown,
McKibben will probably be remembered as the guy who pushed
the button. ``That kind of annoys me,'' says McKibben, 82,
folding himself down on a couch in his cluttered study in
White Rock. ``I consider it a minor part of my work.''
exhaustive preparation
It wasn't minor at the time, of course. McKibben, a lanky
Missouri farm boy-turned-Ph.D physicist, sat at the Trinity
control panel. For three months, he had been wiring
instruments across 360 square miles of desert around a 100-
foot steel tower. The fat implosion bomb, 5 feet round, 5
tons heavy, squatted in a harness of cables on a platform on
top. And the desert floor was scattered with instruments.
McKibben, of the University of Wisconsin, had spent the
night at the tower on guard duty with two Harvard physicists,
Trinity director Kenneth Bainbridge and Russian explosives
wizard George Kistiakowsky, a former Cossack.
This was the second night of uneasy thunderstorms with
close strikes of lightning in the Jornada.
McKibben fell asleep under some tarps on the clean linoleum
floor at the tower base where the final assembly team had
done its job carefully, very carefully.
And McKibben had a dream. It was simple, peaceful. ``I
started dreaming Kistiakowsky had gotten a garden hose and
was sprinkling the bomb. Then I woke up and realized there
was rain in my face.''
everything in place
Soon the rain paused, and Bainbridge rescheduled the shot
for 5:30 a.m. After closing the last open circuits, the three
physicists drove south in a jeep as fast as they could on the
straight blacktop road.
They were the last men out of the zone of lethal heat,
blast and radiation. The nearest humans were in bunkers
called North 10,000, West 10,000 and South 10,000 because
they were 10,000 meters (6.2 miles) from Ground Zero.
``We got to South 10,000 (the control bunker) at 5:10, and
that was the time I needed to throw the first switch,''
McKibben recalls. Allison took up the microphone in the
countdown booth. A quick young Harvard physicist named Donald
Hornig, who would become President Johnson's science adviser
18 years later, took his place near McKibben at an abort
switch. Hornig's job was to stop everything if the detonation
circuit faltered, in order to save the first precious
production of the Hanford, Wash., plutonium plant.
Kistiakowsky, who would become President Eisenhower's
science adviser, was in and out of the crowded room. An 18-
year-old soldier named Val Fitch was attending British
scientist Ernest Titterton at a set of vacuum tubes that
would deliver the detonating voltage 6 miles of cable. Fitch
would win the 1980 Nobel Prize in physics. Also there was
Navy Cmdr. Norris Bradbury, who would become director of the
Los Alamos lab from 1945-70.
McKibben recalls these men but says, ``I didn't see
Oppenheimer. I was told that he came in the door and observed
me at the controls and went away. Just to see that I was
sane.'' And he laughs.
Hundreds turned their expectant eyes to the unforgiving New
Mexico desert; it was a who's who of the scientific world.
At North 10,000, Berlyn Brixner was in the open on top of
the bunker at the controls of a fast movie camera with a
blackened viewfinder. ``I was one of the few people given
permission to look directly at the bomb at zero time,'' says
Brixner, an amiable man of 84 sitting alertly in his
minimalist living room in a ponderosa-shaded Los Alamos
neighborhood.
Brixner's assignment as chief photographer was this: Shoot
movies in 16-millimeter black-and-white, from every angle and
distance and at every speed, of an unknown event beginning
with the brightest flash ever produced on Earth.
``The theoretical people had calculated a . . . 10-sun
brightness. So that was easy,'' Brixner says. ``All I had to
do was go out and point my camera at the sun and take some
pictures. Ten times that was easy to calculate.''
The theoretical people also knew a little about radiation,
which fogs film, and Brixner consequently shielded two of his
near-tower cameras behind 12-inch-thick leaded glass. Some of
his cameras were so fast they shot 100 feet of film in a
second. Some were 20 miles away and ran for 10 minutes.
And now he waited on top of the bunker, gripping the
panning mechanism of his movie camera, which like all the
others would be turned on by signals from McKibben's control
panel.
sneaking a camera in
At Base Camp, the old David McDonald ranch house 10 miles
south of the tower, the box-seat audience included Maj. Gen.
Leslie Groves, the hard-driving director of the whole
Manhattan Project, and its presidential overseers--Carnegie
Institute president Vannevar Bush and Harvard president James
Bryant Conant. Among the physicists at Base Camp were I.I.
Rabi, a New Yorker who would go on to win a Nobel Prize, and
the revered Italian Enrico Fermi, who had led the research on
the first nuclear chain reaction. Among the 250 lab workers
and 125 soldiers was a young civilian technician named Jack
Aeby who was exempt from the draft because he'd suffered from
tuberculosis.
Now 72 and retired from a Los Alamos career in health
physics, Aeby sits in his solar home near Espanola and
recalls how his job in the weeks leading to the test was to
help the Italian physicist Emilio Segre set radiation
detectors near the tower. Some of the instruments were hung
on barrage balloons tethered 800 yards from the tower. They'd
be vaporized in a millisecond after they transmitted their
nuclear data.
Aeby carried his personal 35 millimeter still camera, which
Segre got through security, and as the countdown started, he
was planning to take a new Anscochrome color transparency
picture of the bomb. Aeby had carried a chair out into the
darkness and was sitting there with the camera propped on the
back and pointed north. He put on his government-issue
welding goggles, not noticing in the dark that there was a
crack in one lens. And he listened to the countdown on the
Base Camp loudspeakers.
preparing for the best
At the VIP viewing area called Compania Hill, 20 miles
northwest of the tower and about 10 miles southeast of the
village of San Antonio, N.M., two refugee physicists put on
sunscreen in the dark. They were Edward Teller of Hungary and
Hans Bethe of Germany. Teller would become famous as an
advocate of the hydrogen bomb, and Bethe would win the 1967
Nobel Prize in physics.
Teller put on gloves to protect his hands and sunglasses
under his welder's goggles, for extra protection. ``I
expected it to work,'' Teller, now 87 and bent, said in a
June interview.
Not far away was German Communist refugee Klaus Fuchs, who
would be uncovered as a Russian spy five years later.
Outside the Jornada, of course, New Mexico had eyes and
ears. Teller said that many Los Alamos employees, including
his secretary Mary Argo, clipped away to Sandia Crest for a
direct 100-mile view of the shot that morning.
And in Potsdam, just outside the rubble of bombed-out
Berlin, President Truman waited for coded messages so he
could tell Josef Stalin what the Russians already knew.
But the rest of the world didn't have a clue. Not the B-29
pilots who had hit Tokyo, again, with 3,000 conventional
bombs that Friday. Not the 750,000 American troops that would
be needed in the planned Nov. 1 invasion of Japan.
A countdown. A bellow of ``Zero!'' Silence. A flash of
light brighter than the rising of the sun. Then the shock
wave hit, and the blast's roar echoed off the mountains.
[[Page S 10084]]
At minus 45 seconds, McKibben cut in an automatic timing
drum he and Clarence Turner had made to generate the final 20
relay signals, including the big one. The drum turned once a
second, and McKibben says he had attached a chime that struck
once each revolution. So there were 44 chimes before Allison
bellowed: ``Zero!''
It was 5:29.45 a.m. Mountain War Time, the same as Mountain
Daylight Time.
McKibben's bunker was under dirt on the north, and there
was a small open door on the south, facing away from the
shot.
``Suddenly, I realized there was a hell of a lot more light
coming in the back door,'' McKibben says. ``A very brilliant
light. It outdid the light I had on the control panel many
times over. I looked out the back door and I could see
everything brighter than daylight.''
Aeby had put his Perfex 44 camera on ``bulb'' and in the
dark before ``Zero'' opened up the shutter, figuring that way
he'd get a good image of the flash. Suddenly, the light cut a
sharp white line across his vision. ``I could see that crack
for some time afterward,'' he says. It was daylight, and Aeby
flung off the goggles to reset his camera. ``I released the
shutter, cranked the diaphragm down, changed the shutter
speed and fired three times in succession,'' he says. ``I
quit at three because I was out of film.''
Brixner, at North 10,000, was stunned. ``The whole filter
seemed to light up as bright as the sun. I was temporarily
blinded. I looked to the side. The Oscura Mountains were as
bright as day. I saw this tremendous ball of fire, and it was
rising. I was just spellbound! I followed it as it rose. Then
it dawned on me. I'm the photographer! I've gotta get that
ball of fire.'' He jerked the camera up.
One thing more, he says: ``There was no sound! It all took
place in absolute silence.''
unique sights and sounds
By the time the blast hit, 30 seconds after the flash, most
of Brixner's 55 cameras in the desert were finished. Some had
done their work in a second. There would be 100,000 frames to
develop in black and white and a few in temperamental
Kodachrome.
In the silence, McKibben stepped out the back door of South
10,000 and looked north over the bunker. ``It was quite a
pretty sight. Colored. Purplish. No doubt from the iron in
the tower and a lot of soil off the ground that had been
vaporized. I was surprised at the enormity of it and
immediately felt it had gone big.''
McKibben ducked behind the bunker just as the shock wave
hit. ``Then an amazing thing: It was followed by echoes from
the mountains. There was one echo after another. A real
symphony of echoes.''
As the shock wave hit Base Camp, Aeby saw Enrico Fermi with
a handful of torn paper. ``He was dribbling it in the air.
When the shock wave came it moved the confetti.''
Fermi had just estimated the yield of the first nuclear
explosion at the equivalent of 10,000 tons of TNT. Later
measures put the yield nearly twice as much, at 18.6
kilotons. And this terrible new energy came from a plutonium
ball weighing 13.6 pounds.
Thes test's success brought elation yet was tempered for
many by the knowledge that the world had suddenly taken a
hazardous turn.
Robert Van Gemert of Albuquerque, now 79, who was at Base
Camp after the shot, says, ``I'm just amazed how those
scientists whipped out so many bottles of gin or whatever
they could find. And it was rapidly consumed, I can tell you
that.''
Writer Lansing Lamont in 1965 recorded secondhand some GI
exclamations: ``Buddy, you just saw the end of the war!''
``Now we've got the world by the tail!''
At South 10,000, Frank Oppenheimer recalled, his brother
probably said, ``It worked!'' Kistiakowsky is supposed to
have said to Robert Oppenheimer, ``You owe me 10 dollars''
because of a bet they had. Bainbridge is supposed to have
told Oppie, ``Now we are all sons of bitches.''
At Compania Hill, Teller remembers, ``I was impressed.''
Hans Bethe, now 89, remembers his first thought was,
``We've done it!'' and his second was, ``What a terrible
weapon have we fashioned.''
fleeing the radiation
At North 10,000, Brixner and the others were thinking
suddenly only of a kind of hazard the world had never known.
``I was looking up, and I noticed there was a red haze up
there, and it seemed to be coming down on us,'' he says.
``Pretty soon the radiation monitors said, `The radiation
is rising! We've got to evacuate!' I said, `That's fine, but
not until I get all the film from my cameras.' '' In the
midst of the world's first fallout, somebody helped Brixner
throw his last three cameras in an Army car, and they all got
out of there fast. Film badges later showed they got low
doses--by the standards of the time.
About 160 men were waiting secretly north of the Jornada
with enough vehicles to evacuate the
small communities in the probable fallout path. Gen. Groves
had phoned Gov. John Dempsey before the test to warn him
that he might be asked to declare martial law in southwest
New Mexico.
But the radiation readings from people secretly stationed
all over New Mexico stayed safe--again by the standards of
the time.
The test was shrouded in secrecy, but, within weeks, the
world would know what science had wrought in a lonely stretch
of New Mexico desert.
When Teller returned to his Los Alamos office, he says,
Mary Argo ran to him, breaking all the secrecy rules, `` `Mr.
Teller! Mr. Teller! Did you ever see such a thing in your
life?' I laughed. And she laughed,'' he says with joy in his
voice. ``Does that tell you something?''
At community radio station KRS in Los Alamos, Bob Porton, a
GI, was about to rebroadcast the noon news, courtesy of KOB.
``Suddenly, about 30 or 40 scientists all came in and stood
around,'' he says. ``We knew something was up.''
The lead story, Porton says, was this: ``The commanding
officer of Alamogordo Air Base announced this morning a huge
ammunition dump had blown up, but there were no injuries.''
``All these scientists jumped up and down and slapped each
other on the back,'' Porton says. ``I was familiar with
secrecy. I never asked any questions. But I knew it was
something big.''
It was something big. What they'd heard was the coverup
story for the first atomic bomb blast.
counting backward again
Brixner was on his way to Hollywood to get his film
developed in secrecy at a studio lab. One reel showed his
jerk of the camera.
Aeby developed his color film that night in Los Alamos,
using the complex system of a half dozen Ansco chemicals. The
first shot of the bomb was overexposed off the scale, but one
of the next three became the only good color picture known of
the first atomic explosion.
Weeks later, Ellen Wilder Bradbury of Santa Fe recalls, the
Wilder family tuned in the only radio they had, in their car,
to hear a wire recording broadcast over KRS. Ellen was about
five and hadn't understood about Hiroshima. And now she was
hearing a recording made in the cockpit of Bocks Car, the B-
29 that dropped ``Fat Man,'' identical in design to the
Trinity bomb, on Nagasaki.
Ellen, who would marry Norris Bradbury's son, recalls the
now-lost recording clearly: ``They said, `We've got an
opening in the clouds. OK. We're going ahead.' And then they
counted down to drop it. And they did say, `Bombs away!' But
I had just learned to count, and I was most impressed by the
fact that they could count backwards.''
____
Locals Had Ringside Seat to History
(By Fritz Thompson)
Sparkey Harkey and his son, Richard, were standing in the
gloom before dawn, waiting for a train at Ancho, N.M., when
the bomb went off.
``Everything suddenly got brighter than daylight,'' Richard
Harkey remembers today. ``My dad thought for sure the steam
locomotive had blown up.''.
Ir was 5:29.45 a.m. on July 16, 1945. Harkey and his father
didn't know it then, but they had just witnessed, in that
instant 50 years ago, an event that came to change the course
of history and to thereafter touch the lives of everyone in
the world.
It was mankind's first detonation of an atomic bomb--at
Ground Zero on the empty, foreboding sweep of some of the
most desolate land in New Mexico; Jornada del Muerto, it is
called, the Journey of Death.
Awesomely thunderous, the explosion transformed the sand in
the desert to green glass, hurled dust and smoke thousands of
feet into the sky and startled the bejabbers out of early
morning risers in central New Mexico.
The place where the bomb exploded is called Trinity Site,
and it was 50 miles and a mountain range away from the
Harkeys, standing as they were on the tracks, mouths agape,
bathed in the glow from man's most fearsome and terrible
weapon. That they could see a manmade light brighter than the
sun from their far vantage point attests to the incredible
power unleashed that morning.
Ancho was not even a whistle-stop then. Sparkey, the
stationmaster, was out on the tracks, ready to wave a red
flag to stop the train so Richard, then 18, could board and
ride to his job in Tucumcari.
``It was a blinding flash and it lasted at least a full
minute,'' Richard says. ``We didn't know what it was.''
Was he curious?
``Yeah. But when you see something like that you're so
flabbergasted that you just let it go.''
The sun was coming up
Ranchers and other residents on both sides of the Oscura
Mountains had a ringside seat to the explosion but didn't
know it. In one of the best-kept secrets before or since,
civilians had no warning.
The lone exception was the late Jose Miera, proprietor of
the Owl Bar in San Antonio, a mere 35 unobstructed miles
northwest from Trinity and a popular hangout for the site's
scientists and soldiers. Rowena Baca, who runs the family
establishment these days, says friendly MPs that night went
to her grandfather's house, woke him up, ``and told him to
stand in the street out front because he was going to see
something he had never seen before.''
Sure enough.
Baca remembers that the sky suddenly turned red. It
illuminated the inside of the house she was in, reflecting
red off the walls and the ceiling.
``My grandmother shoved me and my cousin under a bed,''
Baca remembers, ``because she thought it was the end of the
world.''.
At the same moment, a U.S. Navy aviator named John R. Lugo,
now of Scottsdale,
[[Page S 10085]]
Ariz., was flying a naval transport plane at 10,000 feet some 30 miles
east of Albuquerque, en route to the West Coast.
``I saw this tremendous explosion to the south of me,
roughly 55 miles from my position,'' Lugo recalls. ``My first
impression was, like, the sun was coming up in the south.
What a ball of fire! It was so bright it lit up the cockpit
of the plane.''
Lugo radioed Albuquerque. He got no explanation for the
blast, but was told ``don't fly south.''
As the sun itself finally rose, rancher Dolly Onsrud of
Oscuro woke up, looked out her window and saw a mushroom
cloud rising from the other side of the mountains--right
about where her cattle-grazing land had been before the U.S.
Army took it over three years earlier.
She had been none too happy about giving up her 36
sections, and now it looked as if the government was blowing
it up.
Like Onsrud, most ranchers who witnessed some aspect of the
blast are the same ones who were moved off what became White
Sands Missile Range. They are still bitter--bitter that the
Army never returned the land, bitter that they weren't more
generously compensated for giving up their ranches for what
they believed was a patriotic duty. And, these days, they
would much rather talk about their lost lands than about the
first atomic bomb.
With the passage of half a century, these same people also
find it remarkable that the government never warned them
about an event that some scientists thought might set off a
chain reaction and destroy all humanity.
The fact was, not many workers at Trinity knew for sure
what they were working on. Retired teacher Grace Lucero of
San Antonio said soldiers who came to the bar that her
husband operated told him they were building a tower. ``They
said they didn't know what it was for,'' Lucero says. The
tower, everyone later learned, steadied the bomb before it
was detonated.
``No one knew what was going on out there,'' says Evelyn
Fite Tune, who lives on a family ranch 24 miles west of
Trinity. ``And of course none of us ever heard of Los Alamos
or the atomic bomb.''
She and her late husband, Dean Fite, were away in Nevada
when the blast went off. They couldn't tell from the news
accounts of those days exactly where it happened.
``Finally, on the way back we went to a movie house in
Denver and watched the newsreel,'' she says. ``When they
showed the hills around the blast area, my husband said
`Hell, that's our ranch!' ''
Pat Withers lives south of Carrizozo. He is 86 now and has
been a rancher all his life. His house is 300 yards from the
black and hardened lava flow that's sometimes called the
malpais.
``The explosion was loud enough that I jumped out of bed,''
he says. ``I thought the malpais had blowed up. It wasn't on
fire, so I went back to bed.''
Few ranchers had an experience to match that of William
Wrye, whose house then and now is 20 miles northeast of
Trinity.
Wrye and his wife, Helen, had been returning from a tiring
trip to Amarillo the night before the explosion. ``We got to
Bingham (on U.S. 380) and there were eight or 10 vehicles and
all kinds of lights shining up on the clouds. We were stopped
by an MP and a flashing red light. After we told them who we
were, they let us go on to the ranch. We were so tired we
must have slept right through the blast.
``Next morning, we were eating breakfast when we saw a
couple of soldiers with a little black box out by the stock
tank, I went out there and asked what they were doing, and
they said they were looking for radioactivity. Well, we had
no idea what radioactivity was back then. I told them we
didn't even have the radio on.
``For four or five days after that, a white substance like
flour settled on everything. it got on the posts of the
corral and you couldn't see it real well in the daylight, but
at night it would glow.''
Before long, Wrye's whiskers stopped growing. Three or four
months later, they came back, but they were white, then
later, black.
Cattle in the area sprouted white hair along the side that
had been exposed to the blast. Half the coat on Wrye's black
cat turned white.
End of innocence
Out at the north end of the Oscura range, 30 miles from
Trinity, rancher Bill Gallacher was 15 years old. He
remembers the blast, that it lighted up the sky and the rooms
in his house, much brighter than a bolt of lightning. His
father, evidently man of few words who was just getting out
of bed, simply said ``Damm.''
``It was a sort-of-sudden deal,'' Gallacher says,
``especially before you've had your morning coffee.''
Several ranchers say they never believed the Army cover
story that an ammunition dump had blown up. But they didn't
guess what it was until the devastation of bombs at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki weeks later. Even then, they didn't guess the
import of what had been wrought in their backyard.
Evelyn Fite Tune and her friends and neighbors visited the
site soon after. ``We found the hole, we picked up the glass,
we climbed the twisted and melted parts of the tower,'' she
says.
``All those people,'' she says, ``grew up and got married
and had kids. Nobody that I know of ever turned up sterile.''
Back at the Wrye Ranch, Helen Wrye goes to the front door,
gazing at the sweep of prairie and desert, the Oscuras
looming to the south, 20 miles from here to Trinity. She
speaks of this dawn of the atomic age, and she sounds
wistful. ``People weren't afraid of the government then,''
she says. ``It was a time of innocence. People were trusting.
We had never heard of an atomic bomb.''
She is silhouetted against the sunlight of a bright spring
day.
``It was a happy time to live,'' she says. ``It was a happy
time to live.''
A-Bomb Scientists Bear No Regrets
(By Patrick Armijo)
Los Alamos.--The view from three Manhattan Project
scientists was unanimous Thursday.
Questioned by Japanese journalists who wanted to know what
they felt upon hearing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
three couldn't hide the pride they have in the work they did
50 years ago.
The retired scientists said their work on the bomb was
vital to ending World War II--that bombing Hiroshima and
Nagasaki was necessary to end prolonged fighting.
``It looked like very quickly it would be the end of the
war, which otherwise who knew how long it would drag on?''
Manhattan Project chemist John Balagna told Hiromasa Konishi
of Japan America Television.
Konishi was at the Bradbury Science Museum with several
other reporters from Japan, Britain and Australia to hear the
Manhattan Project recollections of Balagna, L.D.P. ``Perc''
King and Joseph McKibben.
Balagna said the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki kept
someone from using the even more destructive hydrogen bomb in
later years.
``The demonstration was so graphic, it put the fear of the
Lord in everyone,'' he said. ``That's what kept the Cold War
cold.''
He said he believes invading Japan would have resulted in
more loss of life than the bombings.
The Japanese reporters' perspective differed.
``The director Steven Spielberg asked me why the cities
were rebuilt and not kept as a memorial to genocide. It was
like a genocide. The two bombs killed 200,000 people
instantly,'' Konishi said.
Japan America Television was in Los Alamos working on
stories for the 50th anniversary of the bombings.
Konishi said the bombing of Nagasaki, in particular, was
``a difficult thing for the Japanese people to understand.''
The Japanese still question the thinking behind the
bombings, Konishi said, but his country for the past several
years also has been coming to grips with its wartime
``atrocities.''
Itsuki Iwata, Los Angeles bureau chief for The Yomiuri
Shibun, a Japanese newspaper, said he has conducted numerous
interviews with the Manhattan scientists, and virtually all
report they had few moral qualms about using the A-bomb.
``The view of the scientists is very much like the point of
view you hear today. I think this is a very difficult thing
for the scientists to talk about,'' Iwata said.
For King the problems people face today can't be
superimposed onto 1945.
``We were terribly worried that Hitler had it (the bomb).
It was the inspiration to work very long hours, six days a
week,'' he said.
Balagna, who lost a brother in France about a month after
D-Day, said, ``My only regret is that we didn't finish in
time to use it on Hitler.''
____________________