Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020 Copyright © Stephen Walker 2005, 2020 Cover image © Galerie Bilderwelt / Getty Images Stephen Walker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008372552 Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008372569 Version: 2020-08-04

PRAISE FOR
Shockwave

“Dramatic … an important page-turner Walker’s admirably even-handed and smoothly written history records the countdown from the explosion of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in July 1945 to the incineration of Hiroshima, Japan, three weeks later.”

Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A-)

“A meticulous, emotionally devastating portrait of both sides. … [Walker] creates an arresting feeling of suspense, but also the structure adds an overwhelming sense of the personal, individual impact the bomb would have.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Those who revere John Hersey’s Hiroshima as a classic piece of reporting about an act unprecedented in human history-the instantaneous annihilation of tens of thousands of civilians by human agency-may approach a new book on the subject with lowered expectations. But in Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, Stephen Walker has painted on a larger canvas.”

Washington Post

“As the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima approaches, this book offers a fascinating look at a moment in history that for many of us has become distant and unimaginable. The book has the feel of a suspense novel, unfolding with such tension and drama that we must remind ourselves that we know what will happen Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Shockwave brings to life one of history’s most profound events. Don’t miss it.”

Arizona Republic

“Electrifying…. The tension and concentration of Walker’s thriller-like prose elicits a visceral response, but he also raises complicated and urgent questions about our continued harboring and development of nuclear weapons.”

Chicago Tribune

“A gripping tale which takes us back to 1945-allowing readers to appreciate the spectacular scientific effort that created this tool of doom and see how war blurs moral landscapes.”

News & Observer

“Shockwave is a stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read.”

Irish Times

“Uniquely readable, immediate, and human…. Every account of the destruction of Hiroshima is dramatic, but historian and filmmaker Walker has created an exceptionally taut and revealing chronicle.”

Booklist (starred review)

“Walker takes readers on a roller-coaster ride through the memories of American servicemen, Japanese soldiers and civilians, and the polyglot team of scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project…. Invite[s] comparison with John Hersey’s still-classic Hiroshima.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Superb…. Walker writes with a sense of urgency and high drama … engrossing [and] saddening.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Telling the inside story of the scientists, the pilots, and not least the victims, [Stephen Walker] constructs a factual thriller that grips the reader from the first page to the last.”

Die Zeit (Germany)

“Stephen Walker’s meticulous reconstruction of events enables us to learn virtually unknown details about the three weeks between the Alamogordo experiment and the launch of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”

Il Tempo (Italy)

“The author reconstructs the story with all the power of a very highquality documentary film.”

Asahi Shimbun (Japan)

For Sally, whose love, spirit, and indomitable courage inspired every word

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Shockwave

Dedication

Preface to the 2020 Edition

Introduction

A Note on Time

Prologue: Twelve Hours Before Zero

Act I: Three Weeks Earlier

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Act II: Decision

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Act III: Delivery

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One: Six Hours Before Zero

Twenty-Two: Two Hours Before Zero

Twenty-Three: One Hour Before Zero

Twenty-Four: Thirty Minutes Before Zero

Twenty-Five: Three Minutes Before Zero

Twenty-Six: Forty-Five Seconds Before Zero

Act IV: Impacty

Twenty-Seven: Zero Plus One Minute

Twenty-Eight: Zero Plus Fifteen Minutes

Twenty-Nine: Zero Plus One Hour

Thirty: Zero Plus Three Hours

Thirty-One: Zero Plus Twelve Hours

Thirty-Two: Zero Plus Eighteen Hours

Epilogue

Picture Section

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

Sources and Bibliography

Permissions

Also By Stephen Walker

About the Publisher

PREFACE TO THE 2020 EDITION

ON A SEPTEMBER day in 1933, the Hungarian-German physicist Leo Szilard was about to cross a street in London when, in the time it took for the traffic lights to change from red to green, he suddenly conceived the principle of an atomic bomb. The idea horrified him, so much so that by July 1945, with the war against Nazi Germany won, he desperately tried to stop the United States from even testing such a weapon, let alone using it in anger. In a petition circulated among fellow scientists he wrote that “a nation which uses these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.”

His petition was ignored. History took its course and the names of two Japanese cities were permanently branded on the world’s consciousness. But the force of Szilard’s words has not been lost in the decades after he wrote them. Since 1945, our planet has existed beneath a Damocles’ sword of near-total destruction. That was the case when I wrote Shockwave in 2005 on the sixtieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but it is alarmingly more so on this seventy-fifth anniversary, fifteen years later.

There are, by some estimates, almost 14,000 nuclear weapons in the world today. Approximately 90 percent of these are Russian and American; between them the two nations have the potential to unleash the destructive power of more than 300,000 Hiroshimasized bombs, enough to obliterate almost all life everywhere.

Such numbers, though shocking and unimaginable, are actually lower than they were when this book was first published, thanks to the 2010 New START (Strategic Arms Talks) agreement between the US and Russia. But in the meantime the world has changed. A president currently sits in the White House about whom almost nothing is predictable except his unpredictability. A leader sits in the Kremlin whose grip on the levers of power is far more ruthless than it once was. The actions of Vladimir Putin in the Crimea and Syria have sparked fears of a new cold war, founded on deep mutual suspicion and mistrust. If the West is perceived by many Russians as a genuine threat to the integrity of its borders, Putin’s Russia is perceived by the West as increasingly aggressive, more confident and much more dangerous. In 2019, President Trump unilaterally withdrew from a long-standing intermediate range nuclear weapons treaty with Russia on the grounds that the Russians were breaking the rules. The Russians accused the Americans of doing the same. But the reality is that both sides are developing radically new weapons to replace their ageing stockpiles. In such a climate, there are no guarantees that New START, the sole remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the two nuclear superpowers, will survive its expiry date of 2021. After that it’s anyone’s guess what will happen next.

The world has changed in other ways too. The US and Russia may have reduced the numbers of their nuclear weapons since this book was originally published; other nations, unconstrained by arms control treaties, have increased them. China, a political and economic powerhouse of a different order from fifteen years ago, is now the globe’s second-largest arms exporter, with a rapidly growing—and rapidly modernizing—nuclear arsenal of its own. India and Pakistan have more than doubled, and very possibly tripled, their weapon totals. North Korea joined the party long ago, exploding its first atomic bomb in 2006 followed by a further five tests of ever bigger bombs, in conjunction with an active missile program. It remains at best only a matter of time before President Trump’s “Rocket Man” has the potential to deliver nuclear terror to any part of Europe and to the entire United States.

And, as I write this, the story is taking new, darker twists. Trump’s policy of engaged hostility toward Iran has ripped holes in the 2015 treaty designed to contain that country’s nuclear ambitions. Now its government is actively enriching uranium, the core substance required to make a nuclear weapon, in explicit breach of the treaty’s restrictions. If Iran gets the bomb, the Saudis say they will build their own. Turkey’s president has openly argued that it is his country’s right too to develop nuclear weapons. And with Israel already a substantial nuclear power in a region simmering with instabilities, the stage could be set for a performance far beyond our worst nightmares.

It may all of course be just that: a nightmare and never a reality, a terror that we will always wake up from. When it comes to discussing nuclear holocausts, it is sometimes easy to lose your bearings. There may be plenty of bombs out there, but the fact is that nobody has used them since 1945. The very scale of their destructive power is, as everyone knows, the best reason why: use them, and you can be pretty certain they will be used on you. That, at least, has been the guiding principle of peace since the Soviets first tested their own bomb in 1949. But as other nations join the nuclear club, or increase their stockpiles, international efforts to keep the beast firmly chained in the very back of its cave are harder to secure. Some governments, perhaps threatened with their own extinction, might perceive the risks of using nuclear bombs rather differently than traditional strategic thinking suggests.

And not just governments. A recent Harvard report claims, with disturbing evidence, that the dangers of nuclear terrorism are “very real.” Over the last quarter century, there have been at least twenty seizures of stolen weapons-grade material, and there is more of the stuff out there that has never been recovered. Modern experts bandy euphemisms such as “radiological dispersal devices;” but what they really mean are dirty, crude, unstable, and—most crucially—easily concealable bombs that could shatter entire cities and kill huge numbers of people. The fear of such weapons goes back a long way. Even in 1946, only a year after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, J. Robert Oppenheimer, technical director of the Manhattan Project and one of the key figures in the pages that follow, told a closed Senate hearing that there would come a time when just a few people could smuggle a nuclear device into New York and destroy it. When asked by one shocked senator, “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Oppenheimer answered, “a screwdriver”—to open every crate.

This, I think, is the truly frightening impact of Szilard’s words seventy-five years ago: that once one nation starts building a bomb, the pattern is set for others—and not just nations—to follow. The process is unstoppable. The box has been opened and, one fears, can never be closed. For all these reasons, it seems more valuable than ever to reacquaint ourselves with how it all began, and why. It is of course impossible for words to capture the true scale of what happened in Hiroshima on that hot August morning in 1945—or in the days, months, years, and decades afterwards. But the witnesses to that event, both in the air and on the ground, elderly women and men who generously invited me into their homes and told me their stories—they surely deserve to have those stories repeated, and especially now.

When I researched Shockwave their numbers were fast dwindling. Today, almost all of my witnesses are gone. A few of the people I met in Hiroshima who experienced the horror as children are still alive; but the crew of the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the bomb, have all passed away. The last member of the committee which selected Hiroshima as the bomb’s target and whom I interviewed in 2004 has also died, as have all the scientists and every actor in the political drama which this book describes. On the sixtieth anniversary, I wrote that we were “slipping from a twilight of memory into history.” Today, fifteen years later, the twilight is almost entirely behind us; but the record these witnesses left behind will always be precious.

Stephen Walker

London, February 2020

INTRODUCTION

TWELVE MILES NORTH of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Highway 502 breaks westward from Route 285 at a little junction called Pojoaque. Take the turn, and you quickly find yourself climbing into the cool heights of the Pajarito mountains. The road snakes upward, higher and higher, winding past the ancient Indian settlements with their resonant Spanish names: Jaconita, El Rancho, San Ildefonso Pueblo. The air becomes perceptibly brighter and clearer. The heady scent of ponderosa pines permeates through the open car window. The view is utterly, enticingly glorious. To the east lie the distant peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range; to the south a wide basin, rich in yellows and pinks and greens, rolling back toward the haze of Santa Fe; to the west, the high mesa of the Jemez Plateau, and a small town that once harbored one of the world’s biggest secrets: Los Alamos, the place where the first atomic bombs were built.

I was there in May 2004, to meet a contributor as part of the research for this book. But halfway up the road I stopped to take in the view. It was midday and despite the altitude—over 7,000 feet—the sun burned the asphalt, creating shimmering pools of air back along the way I had come. The silence was overwhelming. With a sudden shock, I realized that on this very same stretch of highway, fifty-nine years ago, on a sunny summer’s morning just like this one, a closed black truck escorted by seven carloads of security guards crawled down the mountain from Los Alamos, past the old Indian pueblos, past the place where I had now parked my car, down into the plains of Santa Fe. The date was Saturday, July 14, 1945. Inside the black truck, sitting in a sealed lead bucket, was the uranium projectile for an atomic bomb. That afternoon, it was flown from Albuquerque to San Francisco. Two days later it sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in the USS Indianapolis on its way across the Pacific. Twenty-three days later it was carried in the bomb bay of the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay to the city of Hiroshima, where it exploded, killing at least 80,000 people. The journey started here, in these beautiful mountains with their limitless horizons. It ended there, at 9:16 A.M. on August 6, 1945, some 6,000 miles away, on the other side of the world. I was standing on a piece of history.

That journey became my journey. Over the following weeks and months, I followed in the bomb’s footsteps. I visited extraordinary places, I met extraordinary people. I spoke to men who had flown the mission to Hiroshima, to scientists who had built the bomb, to people who had survived it. I had tea with old ladies in Hiroshima hotels who told me stories of pain, despair, and courage beyond any imagining. I had dinner in a Chinese restaurant in California with the man who navigated the Enola Gay and its weapon over 1,500 miles of the Pacific. I sat in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, living room with the nuclear physicist who carried the core of the world’s first atomic bomb, tested in New Mexico three weeks earlier, in a suitcase on the backseat of his car.

I traveled from one coast of the United States to the other, to several cities in Japan, and finally to the tiny, remote island of Tinian in the western Pacific from where Enola Gay departed one tropical night on its mission to Hiroshima. On the way I collected odd pieces of physical evidence that sit in my study as I write: a piece of faintly radioactive trinitite, the strange, greenish, bombblasted earth that still surrounds the site of the first atomic test in New Mexico; a shard of crushed coral, still gleaming white, from the abandoned, jungle-rotted runway where Enola Gay took off six decades ago; a handful of rubble from the Peace Dome in Hiroshima, the one building in the city preserved exactly as it was on the day the bomb fell.

My journey has encompassed moments whose meanings I will always struggle to comprehend. I have been shocked, disturbed, thrilled, appalled, entranced, amazed, and deeply moved. In listening to people’s stories, and in the many accounts I also read, I found myself struck again and again by the confluence of events: the revelation of experiencing the same episode from so many different points of view. This became the core of my book. In moving between eyewitnesses on various parts of the globe I have tried to present one of the most decisive moments in history as it was experienced by people famous and obscure, powerful and ordinary, who lived it in the moment. We know what happened on that August morning in 1945. They did not.

The first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945—two days after that closed black truck with its lead bucket rode down the twisting highway from Los Alamos on the first leg of its trip across the world. Just three weeks separated the test from the destruction of Hiroshima. Only the resources of the richest and most powerful nation of earth could achieve something so colossal so quickly. Those three weeks, from the bomb’s dress rehearsal to its delivery, define the framework of this book. Inevitably any attempt to circumscribe an historical event—especially one as consequential and controversial as this—is bound to be flawed. There are so many roads leading to it. One can start anywhere, even as far back as Leucippus, the Greek philosopher who first proposed the idea of the atom in the fifth century B.C. I chose this brief period in the summer of 1945 because it seemed to me to contain almost every element which makes the story comprehensible, if not always complete. The world really did change in those three weeks, and forever.

What follows is the narrative of those weeks. As I wrote I tried always to keep to one key rule: that every event, incident, character trait, encounter, even piece of dialogue was, as far as possible, accurate and verifiable. Such errors of fact or judgment as there may be in a subject of this magnitude and complexity are of course entirely my responsibility. But this is not a piece of fiction.

Sixty years afterward, the events of July and August 1945 are slipping from a twilight of memory into history. Some of the people I interviewed have since died. Others will pass from us in the months and years to come. The witness they have left is infinitely precious: as a record, as an example, as a warning. In the kind of world we live in today, perhaps there has never been a better time to unfold the years, and return to the moment when it all began.

Stephen Walker

London, April 2005

A NOTE ON TIME

THE EVENTS in this book take place in a number of different time zones around the world. To avoid repetition and potential confusion, I have removed all time zones from the datelines that head the chapters. All times given are local, with one exception: Japan. In the summer of 1945, Japan War Time was one hour behind Guam War Time—the time used by the crewmembers of the Enola Gay on its mission to Hiroshima. For purposes of consistency, I have kept all events in Japan and the western Pacific on Guam War Time.

PROLOGUE TWELVE HOURS BEFORE ZERO

Sunday, August 5, 1945 Shukkeien Garden, Hiroshima

FOR THE REST of his life, Sunao Tsuboi would never forget how beautiful the garden looked that night. The trees, the lake, the little rainbow bridge, the ancient wooden teahouses dotting the banks, the smell of fresh pine, the white heron sleeping on the rock. The perfect stillness of it all. Outside, beyond the garden walls, the city slept in the darkness. In the blackout, it was almost possible to believe there was no city out there at all, no houses, no army, no war. As if he and Reiko, lying together under the stars, were the only people alive in the world. That is how he remembered it the night before the bomb.

They had entered the garden at dusk. There were four of them at first, but the other couple soon drifted away, leaving Sunao and Reiko alone. They wandered slowly along the little secret pathways, they sat in green hidden corners and listened to the cicadas and watched the turtles splashing in the water. At this time in summer the garden was full of flowers, and their scent carried on the night air. Even now, in this fifth year of war, when so many cities had been bombed to destruction, it was wonderful how the Shukkeien Garden survived intact. Designed by a seventeenth-century master of tea ceremonies, its miniaturized landscape idealized a perfect, ordered, peaceful world. The war had simply overlooked it.

As always, they had to be discreet. The authorities, not to mention their own families, disapproved of unmarried couples spending frivolous hours in each other’s company. These were times of self-sacrifice and denial. Every day the newspapers in Hiroshima urged its citizens to work harder and longer and faster, to focus all their energies and spirit on the single goal of victory. Japan was facing its greatest test in history. This was no moment for love.

But Reiko was beautiful. Sunao remembered the first moment he had seen her, earlier that summer by the Ota River. She was sitting on a bridge with a party of other girls, and she was laughing. He was very shy. Perhaps there was something about his shyness that appealed to her. Or perhaps she liked him because there were so few healthy young men still left in the city. They talked for hours, and he told her about himself and his life as an engineering student in the city. He was twenty and she was younger, only just out of school. Her movements were full of grace, and years later he would remember there was something in her voice and her smile that was like a breath of summer. They saw each other all through that hot July. They went to the shrine at Miyajima. They picnicked in the hills overlooking the city. They even went to one of the few movie theaters still open in the commercial district, going separately so they would not be spotted. And they went to the Shukkeien Garden. Sometimes she sent him letters with just the faintest whiff of scent, a luxury in those times of war. But they never kissed. They never even touched. Until that final night.

She had cried when he told her. Of course it was inevitable. He was young, and the war wanted him. Time had run out for both of them. He would be in the army by September, only a few short weeks away. She was inconsolable. She was sure he would die, like all the other young men who had been called up. Everybody knew the Americans were planning an invasion. It was only months or even weeks away. Okinawa, the last Japanese bastion before the home islands, had fallen in June. The battles would be fierce and desperate. She was convinced Sunao would be dead before the end of the year.

They lay together on the grass and she cried, and for the very first time they touched hands. He would never forget that. It was the only time they ever touched. After a while she stopped crying. They spoke little. But their hands never left each other. At some point in the evening there was an air raid alert, but still they did not move. There were often alerts these days, as the Americans passed north over the city. They flew high in their silver planes, sometimes so high that in daylight all you could see was a brilliant white trail in the blue sky. But they took their bombs elsewhere.

A little after midnight the lovers parted. They said good-bye at the gate. Reiko walked away down the street. Sunao watched her go, until she disappeared around a corner. She never looked back. Then he turned slowly toward his home, the memory of her touch still fresh in his mind. Afterward, he would remember this as the happiest night of his life.

He looked up at the sky. The stars were clear and brilliant. Tomorrow was going to be a beautiful day.

ACT I THREE WEEKS EARLIER DRESS REHEARSAL JULY 15–16, 1945

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

JOHN DONNE, “Holy Sonnet XIV”

Now we are all sons of bitches.

KENNETH BAINBRIDGE,

director of the Trinity test, July 16, 1945

ONE

Sunday, July 15, 9 P.M. Trinity Test Site, Forty Miles South of Socorro, New Mexico

DON HORNIG stared up at the tower. The wind and rain whipped through the steel latticework. The storm that had been building throughout the day had finally erupted in all its fury. Flashes of lightning lit the San Andres mountains to the south, and the desert echoed with the growl of thunder. The tower loomed 103 feet above Hornig’s head, a network of black braces and girders reaching upward like a giant electric pylon. By now the clouds were racing so low across the sky, he could barely see the top. Which was just as well, really. He did not want to think about what was at the top.

He began to climb. The wet steel slipped between his fingers and the rain stung his eyes, making it difficult to see. He wore no safety harness. Rung by rung, he pulled himself up the ladder. It was slow going, but he was only twenty-four, and the long Sunday rides over the Pajarito mountain trails near Los Alamos kept him fit. Once or twice he stopped, and he could see the guards below him looking up, like ants on the desert floor. They seemed a long way down.

At the top of the tower, a simple corrugated tin shack rested on a square wooden platform. It was a flimsy, cheaply made structure, obviously not designed to last. It was not much bigger than a garden shed. One of its walls was open to the elements. Hornig stepped off the ladder beside it, pausing by the entrance. A huge, dimly discernible shape crouched inside. There was a bare sixty-watt bulb hanging from the roof. Hornig switched it on and peered inside.

Hulking on a cradle was a metallic-gray, bloated, four-ton steel drum, and it took up almost every inch of space in the shack. Even by day it would have looked ominous, but it looked especially so now with the wind whipping the tin walls, and the dim bulb swaying from the ceiling, and the lightning and thunder edging nearer. A fantastic complex of cables sprouted from its sides like a spillage of guts or arteries, as if it were somehow not inert at all but actually organic, a growing, living, autonomous embryo, awaiting the moment of its birth. Perhaps in acknowledgment of its essence, its creators had even given it a name. A number of names, in fact. They called it The Beast, The Gadget, The Thing, The Device. Sometimes they just called it It. The one thing nobody ever called it was what it actually was. The world’s first atomic bomb.

Hornig squeezed down beside it. The rain pelted on the tin roof like a thousand hammer blows. The wind rattled the thin walls of the bomb’s cage. In a few hours, a fellow scientist named Joe McKibben, standing in a concrete bunker exactly 10,000 yards to the south of this tower, would initiate the final act in what was almost certainly the biggest and most expensive scientific experiment in history. McKibben would press a switch on a panel that in turn would close an automatic timing circuit and begin a forty-fivesecond countdown. At the end of that time a number of different things could happen. The bomb could fail to go off. Or it could detonate with varying magnitudes of explosion. Or, as one Nobel Prize–winning scientist believed possible, it could set fire to the earth’s atmosphere, in the process destroying all life on the planet. The difficulty was that nobody knew.

The only other object in the tin shack, besides an atomic bomb, was a telephone. It was Hornig’s sole means of communication with the outside world. The lines ran down the tower and out through the desert to the control bunker. They were supposed to call him when it was time to come down, and he was supposed to call them if anything went wrong. That was the theory, at any rate. In practice, if anything did go wrong, there might not be much time to start making phone calls.

He had not asked for this job. It was a last-minute decision, made only a couple of hours earlier by the director of the bomb’s laboratory, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was worried about pretty much everything that night, but right then one of his main concerns was security. He wanted somebody to go up there, babysit the bomb, keep a watchful eye on things. Maybe Hornig was unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he was an obvious choice. A brilliant Harvard-trained chemist, he had spent the early war years in New England researching underwater explosives. One day in 1943 his boss had called him into the office and told him he was wanted for a job so secret, not even his boss had a clue what it was. Within days, Hornig had sold his beautiful forty-five-foot yacht Siesta, bought himself a secondhand 1937 Ford Coupe, and together with his twenty-year-old wife, Lilli, an equally brilliant German Jewish refugee whom he had met in a chemistry course at Harvard, headed out west. Their destination was a place he had never heard of. It was called Los Alamos, a secret laboratory in the high mesas northwest of Santa Fe, where they were building very special bombs.

Over the next two years, Hornig designed a wondrously complex piece of equipment called the X-unit. Essentially the bomb’s electric trigger, it would, at the requisite time, send a five-and-a-half-thousand-volt charge to sixty-four detonators arranged in geometric patterns around the bomb’s sphere, like cloves stuck in an apple. Of course, if anything went wrong with the X-unit, there would be no firing charge, no detonation, no explosion. With a two-billion-dollar investment underwriting the project, not to mention the possible fate of the war in the Pacific, this was clearly not an option. Which is why young Don Hornig now found himself sitting all alone on top of a tower in the middle of a violent electrical storm, next to an atomic bomb.

There were clearly ample opportunities here for a little philosophical speculation, but Hornig chose not to indulge. Instead, he started to read a book. It was a cheap paperback thriller called Desert Island Decameron. It was not, he remembers, a very good book. Of course, it was hard to read in the dim sixty-watt light. Plus his concentration skills were not quite up to their usual levels. After all, Hornig knew perhaps better than anyone that a well-placed lightning strike could perform precisely the same function as one of his X-units. It could quite easily set off the detonators, in turn igniting the 5,300 pounds of Comp B and Baratol high explosive surrounding the nuclear core of the bomb. Even if the bomb failed to go nuclear, the high explosive alone made it the biggest conventional weapon of the war. It was quite powerful enough to destroy Hornig, his book, the tower, the guards standing at the base, not to mention a sizable lump of New Mexico real estate.

It did not help that a trial X-unit had already been set off by atmospheric disturbance from a passing cloud just two days previously, instantly discharging its five-and-a-half-thousand-volt firing signal. Fortunately, Hornig survived that time because there was no bomb on the end of it. Nor was it helpful to recall the time he and Lilli were once actually struck by lightning, out in the plains of eastern New Mexico in a place called Tucumcari, as they traveled out west in their Ford Coupe toward Los Alamos. Now it almost felt like a portent, as if some pernicious spirit were determined to end Hornig’s bomb-making career as it had started: with a bang, but the wrong sort of bang. Under the circumstances, he figured it was better to stop thinking of the one-hundred-foot tower standing in the middle of the desert as a giant lightning rod. Far better to think of the rain pouring down the steel frame as an efficient earthing device, carrying any million-volt charge benignly into the ground. After all, if he was right, there was nothing to worry about. And if he was wrong, he would never know it.

In the meantime, Don Hornig and the bomb remained up there together on the tower, while he tried to read his book and waited for the phone to ring, and the thunder and lightning crashed all around him. And out in the concrete bunkers, 10,000 yards to the north and west and south, the men who had spent the last three years designing and building this bomb prayed for the weather to improve. Radiating out from the steel tower was the most elaborate complex of instruments ever devised for a single scientific experiment. There were crusher gauges, geophones, seismographs, gamma sentinels, peak pressure gauges, piezoelectric gauges, sulfur threshold detectors, impulse meters, ionization chambers, and a hundred other kind of instruments, and they hid in the ground or poked through the sagebrush or peeked from behind the mesquite trees. There were twenty-five miles of newly built blacktopped roads, and hundreds of telephone poles carrying 500 miles of cables in every direction. There were the three concrete bunkers to the north, south, and west of the tower, and lead-lined photographic bunkers housing batteries of cameras, some of them mounted on army air force machine-gun turrets. There was a radar unit to track the fireball and four high-speed Mitchell 35mm motion picture cameras to film it in slow motion and innumerable spectrographs to record its radiation. It was an astonishing array of hardware, and it stretched out over this half-forgotten chunk of ancient Apache territory between the Rio Grande to the west and the Oscura mountains to the east, a vastly intricate spider’s web at whose center was that lonely steel tower with its tin shack and its bomb and Don Hornig sitting on top with his paperback.

The tower was the focal point, the hub of man’s first attempt to dabble with the very guts of creation, unleashing new, monstrous fires over the earth. Everything led back to it. Everywhere was locked into its destiny. Not only here in this remote New Mexico plain but across the world: to Washington, to the shattered heart of Europe, to the war-ravaged islands of the Pacific, and finally to two cities in Japan and a young couple touching hands in a tea garden.

Perhaps the bomb makers understood all this when they gave the tower’s site its name. They called it Ground Zero.

FIVE AND A HALF thousand miles away, President Truman was just finishing breakfast on a sunlit porch in the sleepy Berlin suburb of Babelsberg. The weather was perfect, a beautiful, still July morning. Dressed in a polka-dotted bow tie and natty two-tone summer shoes, Truman cut an almost holidaylike appearance, a smart American tourist on a European vacation. But he was not a tourist, and this was no vacation. The president was here for the start of one of the most important conferences of the war. Beginning tomorrow, he would drive from the Little White House—in fact a yellow stucco three-story building which served as his headquarters—to join Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill around a circular table at the Cecilienhof, a cavernous, mock-Tudor, early twentieth-century palace in nearby Potsdam. Together, these three men—the Big Three—would thrash out the shape of the postwar world. They would also determine the fate of Japan.

The war with Germany had already been over for two months, but this final struggle with Japan was proving hugely difficult and costly. Over the past three years American troops had battled their way, island by island, across the Pacific toward the enemy heartland. British and Commonwealth troops had fought bitterly in the dense jungles of Burma in Southeast Asia. The slaughter was horrific on all sides. The Japanese fought tenaciously, bravely, and determinedly. Their culture regarded surrender as a disgrace and death in battle as the ultimate honor. The result was terrible destruction. Only two weeks earlier, on June 30, the island of Okinawa, just 400 miles southwest of Japan, had finally capitulated after three months of vicious, often hand-to-hand combat. The casualty figures spoke brutal truths: at least 12,000 Americans and 107,000 Japanese soldiers killed. The island was defended with ferocious tenacity. Offshore, thousands of kamikaze pilots slammed their planes into American ships, exploding over their decks: 30 vessels were sent to the bottom of the sea, a further 164 damaged. And then there were the civilians: perhaps as many as 100,000 Japanese and Okinawans who died, some caught in the crossfire, some pressed into the fighting, some entombing themselves in the island’s caves. Most of the population had been warned by their leaders of the atrocities they would suffer if captured. To the horror of the advancing Americans, whole families preferred to leap off the cliffs, parents often clutching their children, rather than fall into enemy hands.

Okinawa was the last Japanese outpost before the home islands. The battle was still raging when Truman met his Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House on June 18 to discuss the invasion of Japan itself. His decision was to commit U.S. forces to a massive assault on Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, beginning on November 1, 1945. The operation was code-named Olympic. It was to be followed four months later by Coronet, a second invasion, on the plains near Tokyo. More than three quarters of a million Americans would be involved in Olympic. They would face at least 350,000 enemy troops. The number of Americans expected to die in the operation was a figure that has caused controversy ever since. At the White House meeting, General George Marshall, the Chief of Staff, estimated that 31,000 men would be killed or wounded in the first thirty days of the assault. The course of casualties after that was almost impossible to predict. Perhaps the only certainty was that the Japanese would fight as they had always fought: with everything they had, right up to the bitter end. Unless, of course, the atomic bomb stopped them from fighting at all.

Truman understood this perfectly well as he sat at his breakfast on the Little White House porch. But he understood more. Part of him was dreading this conference. He saw himself as an unknown next to world-class leaders like Stalin and Churchill, a second-rater who had become president only because of Roosevelt’s death back in April. But this flat-footed former railroad worker who had spent part of his boyhood castrating pigs on the family farm had also inherited the bomb. He had, as his secretary of war Henry Stimson explicitly pointed out, a master card up his sleeve, even a royal flush. And its potential benefits were massive. The bomb could alter everything. It could offer a way out of the war with Japan, it could offer a handle against Stalin’s expanding empire, perhaps most of all it could offer an all-powerful weapon in the new game of atomic diplomacy. It could, in effect, turn the Big Three into the Big One—or perhaps the Big One and a Half, with a grateful Churchill trailing at Truman’s apron strings. There was only one question: would it work?

It was a two-billion-dollar gamble. Truman had even deliberately postponed the start of the conference to coincide with the Trinity test. The shot had to go ahead now, today, while Stalin, who was afraid of flying, slowly made his way in his heavily armored train toward Berlin. The president of the United States himself had set the deadline, and time was running out.

SINCE THE MOMENT he had said good-bye to his wife, Kitty, three days earlier, J. Robert Oppenheimer had become an increasingly nervous wreck. His weight was down to a mere 114 pounds, and his crumpled suit hung limply on his tall, cadaverous frame. His face

was equally gaunt, and heavy bags weighed down his blue eyes. Despite doping himself up to the gills on Seconal, he had barely slept for days. A sizable portion of his time was now spent downing gallons of black coffee and smoking endless cigarettes with short, sharp, almost manic puffs. He coughed almost continuously, a thick, heavy, nicotine-filled cough. He was just forty-one years old, but he looked a decade older, an exhausted, fragile, brilliant man facing the greatest challenge of his life.

The pressure he faced was hideous. As the director of the Los Alamos laboratory, he was personally responsible for the test actually succeeding. And so far, despite the most rigorous rehearsal schedule imaginable, plenty had already gone wrong. Even before this mother of all storms hit the ground.

Kitty’s last gesture had been to give him a four-leaf clover, but she might as well have given him a thornbush for all the help it gave. The two of them had also agreed on a special code: if the test were successful, he would send a message telling her she could change the sheets. The likelihood of the sheets ever being changed was now looking remote. A miscellany of cock-ups littered the past fortyeight hours. For instance, there was the case of the bomb’s detonators that had very nearly never made it to the test. Four days ago, on July 11, Kenneth Greisen, a young Cornell explosives expert, had packed 200 detonators in the trunk of his car in Los Alamos, driven off toward the test site, and promptly got himself stopped by a traffic cop near Albuquerque for speeding. By grace or good fortune, the cop did not look in the trunk. Had he done so, it is unlikely either Greisen or his 200 detonators would ever have made it in time for the test.

Then there was that problem with Don Hornig’s X-unit, gaily firing off its thousands of volts after electrical discharge from a passing cloud. Or the failure in the last twenty-four hours of yet another trial X-unit that simply refused to function, its circuits blown to bits. Oppenheimer really laid into Hornig over that one, until it became clear the unit had been tested over and over again, literally hundreds of times, when it was only ever designed to be used once or twice. That may have temporarily calmed Oppenheimer down, but whichever way you looked at it, the X-unit was almost perniciously unreliable, disgorging its thousands of volts when it was not supposed to and stubbornly refusing to do so when it was. And who knew just how it would behave in a few hours’ time?

Nor was that the end of the problems. There was the moment when the bomb was being winched up the tower toward the tin shack and it suddenly slipped, nearly falling fifty feet onto a pile of mattresses beneath. As if they would have helped. Perhaps most worrying of all was the Creutz fiasco, a dress-rehearsal test named after the physicist Edward Creutz in which an exact replica of the test bomb, minus its nuclear core, was exploded in a remote Los Alamos canyon just two days previously. The purpose here was to confirm that the high-explosive assembly surrounding the bomb’s core would work properly. Unfortunately the test failed completely, meaning that the four-ton Gadget now sitting primly on top of its tower at enormous taxpayers’ expense would very likely also fail, thereby damning the entire operation to absolute and predictable meltdown. This sent Oppenheimer into a meltdown of his own, and he poured out all his fear, anger, and venom on Don Hornig’s colorful Ukrainian boss, George Kistiakowsky, who had designed the high-explosive assembly in the first place. As a man who had once fought against the Red Army across 2,000 miles of hostile Russian steppe, Kistiakowsky was not the sort to back down under this kind of onslaught. He immediately bet Oppenheimer a month’s salary against ten dollars that his explosives would work. It is a sign of Oppenheimer’s state of mind that he took the bet.

The next day—less than twenty-four hours before the real test—a physicist called Hans Bethe phoned from Los Alamos to say that the Creutz calculations were erroneous, since the instruments measuring the test were incorrectly set up in the first place. This was something of a mixed blessing. All it meant was that the Creutz experiment was neither a failure nor a success. The bomb might work, but then again it might not. The net result of all this was just the same in that it had Oppenheimer reaching with trembling fingers for yet another of his industrial-strength cigarettes.

And now of course he was facing this terrible storm.

ONE HUNDRED TEN miles north of Ground Zero, Lilli Hornig parked her husband’s 1937 Ford Coupe by the roadside and switched off the engine. She gazed through the windshield into the night. In daylight the view up here on Sandia Peak was magnificent, a limitless panorama of desert and mountains. Lilli knew it well. Sometimes, when the strain at Los Alamos grew too much, she and Don would drive up here and sit in their car 10,000 feet up, with half of southern New Mexico unrolling to the horizon.

But tonight there was almost nothing to see. The lights of a few remote towns spread beneath her, isolated pinpricks in the darkness. Far away in the distance, lightning flashed over the mountains. There was a big storm brewing that way. It was more than a hundred miles off, too far for the sound to reach her. She wondered if Don were anywhere near it.

It was cold up here in the thin evening air. Lilli settled back in her seat and spread a blanket over her knees. She was glad she had brought something to eat. It was going to be a long night. Unlike many of the wives, she knew all about the test. As a highly trained chemist, she was among the privileged in Los Alamos, one of the scientific elect, and she shared in many of its secrets. Her coveted pass gave her access past the armed guards and the electrified wire fences and automatic alarms into the Tech Area, the collection of hastily erected wooden buildings and muddy footpaths that was the laboratory’s heart. In one of those buildings she spent her days working on the purification of a strange, newly created element called plutonium. In the evenings she and Don often sat down to dinner with their scientific colleagues and talked into the night. Sometimes on the weekends they went riding, out into the cool poplar trails from which Los Alamos took its name, or up into the Pajarito mountains. And sometimes they would drive here to Sandia Peak where Lilli sat now in her car, looking out into the night.

It was an exciting life. She was only twenty-three, but almost everybody seemed to be about the same age. It felt like being on a university campus, a rather beautiful one nestling on top of a mesa up in the mountains above Santa Fe. A very unusual campus too, with its roster of stellar scientific talent and its Nobel Prize winners, some of them living virtually next door. It was said that this brandnew town of 5,000–odd inhabitants had the highest IQ of any city in the world. To Lilli and Don, as to so many of their colleagues, it was a heady place to be. There was a terrific sense of purpose they would remember for the rest of their lives. After all, this was where the war would be won! This was where the dream of infinite power would be realized! This was the future! A secret laboratory above the clouds: how could you not feel excited? Especially when you drove down to Santa Fe for drinks in the La Fonda bar and heard people speaking in hushed tones about that strange, secret place up in the hills, like ancient Greeks describing their gods on Olympus.

There were other wives in other cars up there on Sandia staring out into the darkness. Some of them were listening to the radio, some were dozing or eating or trying to keep warm. But they were all waiting. Most had simply been told by their husbands that something very special was going to happen tonight, something extraordinary and unique, just a hundred miles to the south, and that Sandia Peak was the best place to see it. Many of these wives had moved to Los Alamos years ago, never knowing exactly what their husbands did all day. They had given up their homes, their friends, even their families to be there. They lived in a kind of security vacuum, where nobody outside Los Alamos was ever allowed to visit them, where their address was only a P.O. box, where their letters were censored and their phone calls were tapped, where even their babies were sometimes fingerprinted. It was a heavy sacrifice to sever yourself so completely from the world, especially when your own husband was forbidden to tell you what it was all about. Perhaps that was why so many wives were up here now, watching and waiting for whatever it was that was going to happen out there. Perhaps at last they would learn the truth.

Lilli could see the storm down in the desert was growing bigger. Even on Sandia Peak it was beginning to rain. She had driven all this way for nothing; surely they would never fire tonight. It was now nearly midnight. The best thing was to climb into her sleeping bag and try to sleep. She only hoped her husband, Don, was sitting somewhere warmer and more comfortable than she was.

TWO

Jornada del Muerto Desert, New Mexico

IT WAS A strangely appropriate place to test the world’s first nuclear bomb. A parched land largely inhabited by jackrabbits and rattlesnakes and turkey vultures and a few forlorn ranchers scraping out a living until the bomb makers finally evicted them. Even its old Spanish name was appropriate: the Jornada del Muerto, it was called. The Dead Man’s Journey.

The conquistadores had given the land its name. Four hundred years ago they marched here in search of new pickings in the north. From the surrounding hills, Apache swooped down on them, killing off the stragglers as they trailed, thirsty and exhausted, in the burning sun. In later centuries, the descendants of those same Apache attacked the English-speaking white men who came to deprive them of their territory, torching the wagon trains that rolled down from Santa Fe to El Paso. This was a land that knew violence long before the bomb makers staked their claim to it.

The first detachment of military policemen had moved into the Jornada desert back in September. On horseback and in jeeps, they patrolled the 432-square-mile test site, set up security checkpoints, hunted pronghorn antelope, played polo, and generally lived a life so cut off from the rest of the civilized world that each of them would one day receive a Good Conduct Medal for the lowest rate of venereal disease in the army. The only towns nearby were Troy and Carthage, old coal-mining communities abandoned years ago, their empty, dilapidated streets wasting in the midday heat. The few ranchers who lived here were paid to leave their homes, but some refused until they found their water tanks mysteriously perforated or their cattle accidentally shot in the night. Nobody was ever able to prove the military police were responsible, but the ranchers soon left, never to return.

By the spring the area was beginning to fill with teams of construction workers, road builders, engineers, and scientists. A base camp was built around one of the old homesteads, a drab, dustridden, godforsaken collection of hastily erected barrack huts, where the fire ants ate you alive at night and the brackish water gave you dysentery and the trucks had to be banged with sticks every morning to get the rattlers out. The pace of activity quickened with each day, despite the hundred-degree heat and the dust devils that sprang out of nowhere, not to mention the unpredictable hazards of high-flying bombers, which on two occasions dropped a few practice bombs on the base camp by mistake.

By July 13, two days before Don Hornig climbed up his rainsoaked tower, the operation moved into its highest gear. At three o’clock that afternoon, Philip Morrison, a gifted young nuclear physicist, removed two hemispheres of a strange new metal from a vault in one of the most isolated buildings in Los Alamos. Each hemisphere was nickel-plated and sheathed in glittering gold foil. Accompanied by a guard and a radiologist, Morrison placed them both inside a special two-piece magnesium suitcase fitted with twenty shock-absorbing rubber bumpers. It had taken six months to design that suitcase, an indication of the importance of its contents. Because those golden-wrapped hemispheres of metal were far more valuable than the most precious diamonds on earth. Within the perimeters of a closely guarded, highly secret 428,000-acre industrial site in Hanford, Washington—half the size of the state of Rhode Island—mammoth processing plants had been built simply to produce the metal they were made of. So far, these two hemispheres represented their entire output. The metal itself did not even exist four years previously. It was not found in nature. It was made by man, in a fantastic latter-day alchemy that created new elements by tampering with the most basic units of matter. It was named plutonium, after the god of the dead, and it was the secret heart of the atomic bomb.

Morrison carefully placed the suitcase on the backseat of an olive-drab army sedan and climbed in beside it. A security car filled with armed guards led the way, and the convoy threaded its way down the vertiginous switchback roads that led from the high mesa of the laboratory down toward Santa Fe. As the two cars sped through the sleepy streets of pink adobe houses, Morrison kept thinking how extraordinary it was to be carrying the core of the world’s first atomic bomb, riding next to him in its shock-absorbing suitcase on the backseat of an ordinary car.

It was 150 miles from Los Alamos to the test site, and it took five hours to get there. Two thousand yards southeast of Ground Zero, the cars turned down a dust track toward an undistinguished single-story ranch house. An ancient Chicago Aermotor pump stood forlornly in the yard next to an ugly concrete water tank. A few unkempt outbuildings were scattered nearby, adding to the spent, desolate air of the place. But the views were stupendous, especially now with the lowering sun burning the scalloped contours of the Little Burro mountains and Mockingbird Gap to the south.

Apart from the carbine-carrying guards at the entrance, the ranch was empty. It had recently belonged to a rancher named George McDonald. Nobody told him exactly why he and his family had to give up the home where he had lived for half his life. Neither did they tell him to what use his blue-walled, beige-ceilinged front room was about to be put.

Together, Morrison and a colleague carried the suitcase inside, taking care to obey the summons on the doorstep to PLEASE WIPE YOUR FEET. It was an interestingly domestic touch in an otherwise unsettling scene. Everything else about the room was faintly sinister, as if some secret crime were about to be committed inside. For one thing, all the windows were completely sealed with black masking tape. For another, the room was almost disconcertingly clean, like the inside of a laboratory. Which, in a sense, was exactly what it now was. The suitcase was placed on a table. There it remained, with its two gold-wrapped hemispheres inside, for the night. An armed sentry stood outside, but neither he nor anybody else was permitted to enter. Nothing disturbed the case or its contents until nine o’clock the following morning, when the curtain was raised on a bizarre and extraordinary scene.

Nine men, including Morrison, stood around the table on which the plutonium hemispheres now rested on sheets of brown paper. All the men were wearing white surgical coats. One of Morrison’s colleagues, Robert Bacher, turned to an army general and asked him to sign a receipt for the plutonium, worth at least several millions of dollars. The general, Thomas Farrell, jokingly asked if he could hold it first. He wanted to feel what he was buying. He put on a pair of rubber gloves and picked up one of the hemispheres. It was smooth and heavy, and it felt curiously warm to the touch, as if it were alive.

What Farrell was feeling was radioactivity. The artificially created element was literally breaking down in his hand, the unstable nuclei of its atoms ridding themselves of billions of particles in a bid to regain stability. Some of these particles were able to do something that had once been thought impossible: to smash through the fantastically powerful forces that held the atom’s heart—or nucleus—together. And the reason they could do that was because they had no electrical charge themselves. They were called neutrons, and the electrostatic barrier could not keep them out. Like billions of Trojan horses, they slipped at fantastic speeds through the impregnable gate, sundering the nucleus in two, splitting it apart, fissioning it. And when they did that, they released levels of energy hitherto undreamed of in the history of man.

It was science fiction come true. Just forty years earlier, Einstein had offered to the world his revolutionary equation relating energy and matter. The message of that equation was simply this: that matter and energy were not different things but two expressions of the same thing. Matter could be converted into energy and vice versa. Since 99.8 percent of all the matter in the universe was contained in the nucleus of an atom, theoretically the nucleus was a potential source of incredible and unheard-of amounts of energy. A single gram of water could raise a million-ton weight to the top of Mount Everest. A handful of snow could heat a large apartment building for several months. A breath of air could power an airplane continuously for a year. The trick was to get past that barrier and into the nucleus, split it open, convert as much of it as possible into pure energy. Which is where those Trojan horses came in.

The men who now watched General Farrell weigh the plutonium in his rubber-gloved hands had effectively grabbed Einstein’s equation and made it flesh. They had discovered that a specific amount of the radioactive plutonium would liberate enough neutrons to smash enough atoms to release yet more neutrons, which in turn would smash still more atoms in an unstoppable, exponential, ever-expanding chain reaction. The minimum amount of plutonium required to do that was called the critical mass. Exceed the critical mass, and the chain reaction starts. Less than one-millionth of a second later, you have an atomic explosion.

Farrell signed the receipt and handed the plutonium to Louis Slotin, a young Canadian physicist. Slotin’s job was to assemble the bomb’s core. Hunched in rapt concentration over the ranch house table, he set to work. First he nestled a gleaming grape-sized sphere of polonium and beryllium, called the initiator, inside one of the plutonium hemispheres. The initiator’s function was to kickstart the chain reaction, pouring billions of extra neutrons into the supercritical mass at the requisite time, like fuel into a raging furnace. Next, and with infinite care, he placed the second goldwrapped plutonium hemisphere over the first. Geiger counters clicked away, monitoring the neutron count. Every ear in the room strained for the slightest change in pitch or rate. The operation was extremely delicate. If the plutonium went critical, even for an instant, the result would be lethal. Less than a year later, in May 1946, Slotin himself would experience a massive dose of radiation in a criticality experiment in Los Alamos. It would take him seven days to die. Now he continued: adding the parts one by one like pieces of the world’s most expensive jigsaw puzzle. At some point in the morning Oppenheimer came in to see how the work was proceeding. Quietly he was asked to leave. His nervousness was adding to the tension. Outside, the guards waited with their submachine guns in the baking sun. The temperature climbed into the hundreds. And all the while, in the very place where George McDonald and his family had once had their meals or listened to the radio or read or knitted or snoozed, Slotin and his team constructed the core of an atomic bomb.

It looked like an oversized tennis ball when it was finished. A very heavy tennis ball, weighing just over thirteen pounds. Around the core was the tamper, an eighty-pound hollow cylinder of plumcolored uranium. Together, the plutonium core, the initiator, and the tamper formed the bomb’s heart. Later that afternoon, the whole assembly was carried from George McDonald’s living room in a specially designed, ventilated cage, like some sort of highly dangerous wild animal, before being driven on the backseat of another olive-drab army sedan into the wilderness of sagebrush and Joshua trees to the steel tower. There, it was taken out of its cage and slowly lowered deep into the cool center of a five-foot-wide Duralumin ball of high explosives.

The precise arrangement of those high explosives was so pivotal that some of their secrets remained classified for decades. It had taken a number of the world’s most brilliant chemists two years to work it out. In the end, the explosives were packed around the core in two layers, each containing thirty-two sections. Most of the sections were hexagon-shaped so that the whole assembly fitted together piece by piece like segments of a giant soccer ball. The fit had to be perfect. The slightest air gap could turn the bomb into a dud. To reduce the friction between the explosives they were dusted with the best thing to hand, which happened to be Johnson’s Baby Powder. Scotch tape was used to keep them in alignment. Once detonated, they would send a symmetrically converging shockwave down toward the bomb’s plutonium core, a shockwave so powerful and so perfectly spherical it would literally crush or implode that core, squeezing its billions of atoms into a fantastically dense Ping-Pong ball–sized mass for just long enough to sustain a chain reaction, before the whole thing blew itself apart.

That was the theory, at any rate. Of course, nobody knew if it would actually work. In this titanic bid to outdo nature, perhaps it was nature that would have the last laugh. Or so it began to seem, as the bomb was slowly winched up the one-hundred-foot tower toward the tin shack where, less than thirty-six hours later, Don Hornig would keep his lonely vigil amid the rain and thunder.

THE STORM had been building up in the course of the afternoon, and by sunset the skies west of the test site were heavy and overcast. At first Oppenheimer was philosophical, almost poetic, as he watched the clouds gathering. “Funny,” he said to a colleague, “how the mountains always inspire our work.” By late evening, the poetry had gone. Oppenheimer’s anxiety was now palpable to anyone near him, and his ability to make decisions was beginning to derail. The shot had originally been scheduled for 0400 hours. But this storm brought with it a whole new compendium of difficult decisions. Oppenheimer sat in the base camp canteen, chain-smoking and drinking black coffee and worrying about what to do. Should he fire, should he postpone, or should he scrub? It did not help that half the scientists in the canteen kept offering their own suggestions until Oppenheimer’s head was spinning with paralytic indecision. At the best of times his own nervous constitution was not the strongest. As a young man he was once diagnosed with dementia praecox—a form of schizophrenia—after he tried to strangle his best friend on holiday in France. The cause, it was said, was too much tension.

Nor did it help that Enrico Fermi, one of the world’s greatest physicists, was calmly predicting the possibility that the bomb might set fire to the atmosphere and destroy the world. This was not an entirely novel prediction. A couple of years earlier, another physicist at Los Alamos had mathematically predicted a three in one million chance that this would really happen. It was decided that three in one million was a chance worth taking, and the work continued. Of course at that time there was no physical bomb. But now there was, and it was actually sitting out there on top of a tower in the middle of the New Mexico desert, and the shot time was just a few hours away at four o’clock in the morning, and the man who was making these terrifying predictions was not some apocalyptic religious freak but a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who had overseen the design and construction of the world’s first chainreacting atomic pile. Nor was he a lone voice. Others in that canteen took up the theme. Some even took bets: would the bomb simply destroy humanity, or would it actually destroy the entire planet? “We’ve all had a long and joyful life,” said General Farrell, “and maybe we’ll all go out in a blaze of glory.” “Ah,” said another, eyeing the play of thunder and lightning outside the canteen window, “the earth on the eve of its disintegration.”

Perhaps nobody in that room was quite in his right mind that night, least of all the man at the center of it all. Oppenheimer was teetering on the edge of exhaustion, and this, combined with the fear of a possible Armageddon, was surely enough to drive anybody a little crazy. There he was, with his coffee and his cigarettes, with forty-eight hours of knife-edge anxiety behind him and the toughest decision of his life just ahead of him and everybody pitching in with a hundred suggestions about what to do next, when suddenly a big, beefy two-star general abruptly entered the room. He took one look at Oppenheimer, marched over, grasped him by the arm, and rescued him from the crowd.

The general’s name was Leslie Richard Groves, and he was Oppenheimer’s boss. A commanding, conspicuously overweight figure with a funny little mustache, he was also the most reviled, feared and admired man in the entire atom bomb project, which he ran with ruthless megalomania, like the tyrant of a medieval fiefdom.

THEY COULD NOT have been more different. Oppenheimer was the scion of a wealthy Jewish Manhattan family, a brilliantly precocious, pampered boy who gave his first lecture to the New York Mineralogical Society at the age of twelve and once read all six volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a single transcontinental train journey. An almost extreme example of the polymath, he was an outstanding, if not especially original, scientist, fluent in several languages including Sanskrit, a connoisseur of art, haute cuisine, French medieval literature, European capitals, and poetry. It was Oppenheimer who had given the test its code name, Trinity, after a John Donne Holy Sonnet he had been reading one evening. Like almost everything he said, it was apposite, prescient in its association of unearthly power and regeneration.

Groves, a less imaginative man, could not surpass that, but he did give the bomb program its name—the Manhattan Project, after the location of its original offices. The two men were cast in almost opposite molds. Where Oppenheimer was thin, Groves was fat, and his uniform spread tightly over a not very well concealed paunch. His life was an unequal struggle against his weight, and he spent a large portion of his otherwise very well managed time failing to adhere to strict diets. It was rumored he weighed at least 230 pounds, although the actual figure was a secret almost as highly classified as the atomic bomb. He kept two pounds of chocolate bars in his office safe along with top secret files on the atomic bomb program, and one of his aides was responsible for making sure they were always topped up.

Oppenheimer smoked five packs a day and mixed a famously mean martini. Groves hated smoking and was a virtual teetotaler. Oppenheimer was a scientist, Groves an engineer who loathed scientists, damning them as a bunch of hopelessly impractical leftwing “longhairs” who could not run a faculty meeting efficiently, much less a two-billion-dollar bomb program. He once described Los Alamos as the greatest collection of eggheads ever assembled at enormous expense in one place. Oppenheimer was Jewish, Groves was Presbyterian. One of his army-chaplain father’s enduring legacies was to make him a very productive combination of prude and almost inhuman workaholic, able to suppress almost all bodily requirements (apart from chocolate bars) in the energetic pursuit of his goals. Groves lived a life of blameless domesticity with his wife and two children. Oppenheimer had a Communist mistress who later committed suicide and a wife who was on her fourth husband. A cousin of the Nazi field marshal General Keitel (who was later hanged at Nuremburg), Kitty Oppenheimer was a notoriously tough, highly sexed, hard-drinking woman with a well-plumbed vocabulary of swearwords—“not the kind to serve tea,” as one of Groves’s agents put it.

Oppenheimer was an intellectual who believed in open discussion. Groves was a security freak whose obsession with secrecy reached paranoid levels. He used his position as head of the Manhattan Project to build a private intelligence network so pervasive that not even the FBI could get past the gates of one of his nuclear plants. A senior congressman who tried ended up being interrogated in a windowless room for several hours. Not even Groves’s family had the faintest clue what he did in the office all day. The first time they discovered he had spent the last three years running the biggest and most expensive weapons program in history was the day after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. And they heard it on the radio. He set spies on his sister-in-law, and his agents tapped and tailed and bugged Oppenheimer with almost heroic efficiency. He was so charmless, undiplomatic, and uncompromising that even his deputy, Colonel Nichols, described him as “the biggest sonofabitch I’ve ever met in my life.” Nichols also said he was the most capable.

Groves’s capability was legendary. That was why he was chosen to run the Manhattan Project. A West Pointer right down to his bones, he had joined the prestigious Corps of Engineers, quickly building a reputation for taking on—and completing—projects massive enough to break ordinary mortals. His most recent task before Manhattan was to oversee construction of the Pentagon, then the largest building in the world, and he did it in just sixteen months. He ruled the bomb project’s empire—at one point comprising more than 100,000 men and women—with terrific confidence. He took risks where others quailed, spending enormous amounts of money without hesitation to achieve his ends. An early government committee estimated that the entire bomb-building program would cost $133 million. Groves went through that sum in the first few weeks. And it was not only money he took risks with. Perhaps his choice of Oppenheimer was the best proof of his talents. In brazen defiance of his own security people, he chose to overlook Oppenheimer’s open association with almost every Communist front on the West Coast and make him director of his top secret laboratory. And he did it because he knew Oppenheimer was the right man. He understood better than anybody how Oppenheimer’s need to shine, his craving for recognition, would ensure he kept all those Nobel Prize–winning eggheads on track toward their single goal. It was an inspired decision, and one that perfectly captures the force of his personality. For Groves was the kind of man who crushed any obstacles in his path, who broke, beat, bullied, and smashed his way to the promised land of a workable, deliverable atomic bomb; and woe betide those stupid or vain or arrogant enough to get in his way while he was doing it.

Groves was utterly, almost endearingly shameless in his efforts to persuade people to spy on their friends, and he tried to do just that with Oppenheimer’s secretary, Anne Wilson. She bluntly refused, and wrote subsequently that Groves was almost certainly in love with Oppenheimer. She remembered Groves saying, “he has the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, and they look right through you.” It was perhaps the shrewdest insight into this peculiar, unholy, extraordinarily productive, and ultimately world-changing partnership.

Now, as these two men stood outside the base camp canteen watching the approaching storm, they needed each other as never before. It was nearly midnight. Away from the madding crowd of scientists, they made a decision. The planned firing time of 0400 was scrubbed. Instead they agreed to meet at 2 A.M., along with the test’s chief meteorologist, Jack Hubbard. A final decision could then be made. And the New Mexico desert might yet see a second sun rising over the mountains.

Groves told Oppenheimer to get some rest. There was nothing to be done until later. The general went off to his tent and fell into a deep sleep. Oppenheimer obediently returned to his own tent. But he did not sleep. He lay wide awake, smoking and coughing his thick, heavy cough, while the lightning lit up the northern horizon and the wind blew dust devils around the camp.

THREE

Monday, July 16, 11 A.M. Little White House, Babelsberg, Near Potsdam, Germany

WHILE GROVES SLEPT and Oppenheimer smoked, Winston Churchill drove over to Truman’s villa in Babelsberg to meet the new president. Together with Jimmy Byrnes, Truman’s dapper, wily, South Carolinian secretary of state, they sat down in the grand drawing room whose German owners had only recently been evicted by the Russians. Despite Truman’s fears, the two men got on immediately. “He is a most charming and clever person,” wrote Truman in his diary that night. For his part, Churchill was attracted by Truman’s “gay, precise, sparkling manner.” He was also impressed by Truman’s immense determination. It was clear the new president was a man of decision. The two-tone shoes and natty suit were not mentioned.

There was no set brief for this meeting. But behind the informal, easy tone lay a deeper agenda: Stalin and the war in Japan. Four years ago, the Russians had signed a nonaggression pact with the Japanese. Technically it still had a year to run. But that was about to change. Back in February, at the last Big Three conference in Yalta, Stalin had made a promise. Within three months of the cessation of hostilities in Europe, he would tear up the pact and join in the war against Japan. On August 8, the three months would be up. In just twenty-three days, time would run out for the Japanese.

It would also run out for the Americans and the British. At this very moment, Stalin was moving more than a million troops toward his southern border with China, ready to pounce on the Japanese who occupied Manchuria. The Soviet leader could soon extend the hammer and sickle deep into China. His promise at Yalta was a harvest just waiting to be reaped. No doubt he would be more than happy to fulfill it.

Back in February, Churchill and Roosevelt had needed the Russians to help win the war against Japan. But the world at Yalta was a very different place from the world today at Potsdam. Back then the atom bomb was still a developing concept. Now it was sitting on a tower in New Mexico, waiting to be detonated in the next few hours. The bomb offered the perfect solution to a very dangerous crisis. It could win the war against Japan and it could win it quickly, before the Russians set so much as a foot inside Japanese territory. Stalin would understand then what a royal flush looked like when it stared him in the face.

As they sat in that sunny drawing room on that Monday morning, Truman and Churchill knew very well what was at stake. This was a dangerous diplomatic game, and it rested on two critical foundations. The first was that Stalin must not be told about the bomb until the last moment. If he knew, he might attack the Japanese even sooner, grabbing what he could before the Americans abruptly ended the war with their very big bang.

The second foundation was perhaps more directly pertinent. The bomb actually had to work.

JACK HUBBARD was running late for his 2 A.M. meeting with General Groves and Oppenheimer. Huddled in a portable hut near Ground Zero, the test’s thirty-one-year-old chief meteorologist was busy taking last-minute readings. The hut was packed with the very latest, state-of-the-art equipment. There were two army air force weather stations, there were radiosondes and pilot balloon wind observing sets. There were fifty years of New Mexico weather reports sitting in Hubbard’s desk and fourteen experienced meteorologists to advise him, including the man who had selected the day for the Normandy invasion. And all these highly trained people, with all their wondrous, cutting-edge technology, told exactly the same story. The weather was lousy.

The latest readings made accurate predictions almost impossible. For one thing, the winds were changing course with almost dizzying speed. Over the past twelve hours, they had shifted through an entire 360 degrees. The implications were potentially disastrous. Once the bomb went off—if it went off—it would almost certainly suck hundreds of tons of debris and dust into a vast and extremely lethal radioactive cloud that would then travel wherever the winds happened to take it. If the winds were moving east, the cloud would head directly toward the towns of Roswell and Carrizozo. If they were moving northwest, Socorro could be hit. The only chance of this great radioactive ball not unloading its contents on top of the sleeping inhabitants of any sizable conurbation was if the wind was moving northeast. Apart from the odd rancher, a few thousand cattle, plus an unknown number of rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and jackrabbits, there were no towns up that way.

Right now, Hubbard could not predict with any certainty what the winds were going to do in the next few minutes, let alone the next few hours. At 11 P.M., they were going north, threatening Socorro. At 1:15 A.M., they were heading south, directly over the control bunker and base camp. A few weeks earlier, the test’s director, Kenneth Bainbridge, had set out by jeep to chart possible escape routes out of the Jornada in case of catastrophe. He found just three: a poor road that ran southwest toward Elephant Butte, a new access road that ran north, and an old Spanish-Indian trail that meandered south through a pass in the mountains called Mockingbird Gap. To the personnel in the control bunker and base camp, Hubbard’s 1:15 A.M. finding was of more than academic interest. It meant that one of their key escape routes was now closed.

And the winds were only part of the problem. There was the lightning too, which—as Don Hornig knew only too well—could accidentally detonate the bomb. Perhaps most dangerous of all, there was the rain. Only two months earlier, on May 11, Oppenheimer himself had written a highly classified memo to General Groves about the perils of exploding an atomic bomb in what he called “conditions of high humidity.” The result, he wrote, might be to create a radioactive downpour in which “most of the active material will be brought down by the rain in the vicinity of the target area.” The language may be dry, but the message was brutal. Explode the bomb in these conditions, and the result would almost certainly be a deadly radioactive cocktail just waiting to dump its poison straight back onto the ground. Oppenheimer’s words were not lost on Hubbard as he cowered in his portable weather hut. Nor would they be lost on the people of Hiroshima who would experience the exact same phenomenon in just three weeks. Except their language would be more direct. They called it black rain.

To prevent the same catastrophe affecting millions of Americans, teams of fallout monitors were now stationed across the Jornada and beyond. Some of them were driving jeeps so they could chase the radioactive cloud whichever way it happened to go. All of them were in radio contact with one another, using code names borrowed from The Wizard of Oz. The chief monitor was the Tin Woodsman, based in Carrizozo, in the northern Jornada. There were monitors as far away as San Antonio and Fort Sumner, as well as in all three concrete bunkers positioned 10,000 yards from the tower. Headquarters were at base camp, where the test’s senior medical officer would man a command post. He would also keep an open telephone line to a deputy waiting 160 miles north in a Santa Fe hotel room. If the bomb or the radioactive cloud wiped out base camp, this deputy would automatically take command. He would also direct any major evacuations from towns and cities.

The army was out there too. Twenty security officers were positioned within a 100-mile radius to coordinate those evacuations should they be necessary. One hundred twenty-five military policemen were detailed to guard the site during the test, blocking off all access routes. Another 160 men, equipped with trucks, jeeps, and extra rations, were now sitting in the rain north of Trinity, ready to rescue any remote farming communities if the fallout cloud happened to go that way. The base commanders at Alamogordo and Kirtland airports were ordered to establish relief shelters, stockpiled with food and hundreds of cots, in case larger evacuations were required. They were never told why. Nor were they told why they were required to halt all civilian and military air traffic throughout the night.

Now, across the state of New Mexico, an entire population of Americans slept through this stormy night, utterly unaware of the potential dangers surrounding them. Unaware, but not entirely unprotected. After all, nobody wanted this American bomb to kill Americans. The purpose, in the end, was to kill Japanese.

FOUR

Monday, July 16 Japanese Embassy, Moscow

NAOTAKE SATO was drinking heavily these days. The Japanese ambassador to the Soviet Union knew every movement he made was watched day and night by the secret police. Technically his country was still at peace with the Soviets, but the warmth that had once existed between the two nations had cooled to freezing point. Japan was losing the war. Its cities were in ruins, its empire was crumbling, its armies were on the run. It was obvious to Sato that the Russians had little to gain from their nonaggression pact with Japan.

Two days ago, Stalin and his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had departed for Potsdam. The writing was on the wall. As Sato worked in his office near Moscow’s Red Square on this humid morning, the conclusion was inescapable: the Soviet leader knew exactly where his future interests lay. And they were not with Japan. All of which made the growing pile of cables from Tokyo on his desk depressing reading. They had been arriving almost every day, and sometimes more than once. Their author was Shigenori Togo, Japan’s foreign minister, a canny, sixty-two-year-old ex-diplomat whom the emperor had brought back from retirement for one purpose: to seek an honorable way out of the war. The key would be the Russians.

Just four days earlier, on July 12, the emperor had received a former prime minister and close political ally in the Imperial Palace. His name was Prince Fumimaro Konoye, and he was quickly ushered into the emperor’s private apartments. The prince bowed low to the man worshipped throughout Japan as a god: the Emperor Hirohito, Son of Heaven and descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, the divinity who had inaugurated his reign in 1926 as the era of Showa, of Enlightened Peace. But the man standing before Prince Konoye did not look like a god now. He looked like what he was: an exhausted, emaciated, frightened forty-four-yearold insomniac with a twitching right cheek, a powerless and reluctant divinity living amid the ruins of his beloved city.

The emperor was unusually direct. He requested Prince Konoye travel to Moscow as his imperial envoy. Konoye’s duty was clear: he must do everything possible to persuade the Russians to mediate in the war. The emperor’s name would underwrite his efforts, sealing his authority and guaranteeing his plea. The Russians would understand the imperial envoy meant business. Perhaps they would agree to broker a peace from which the emperor and his people could still emerge with their honor intact.

It was a very risky strategy. There were powerful elements in the cabinet who still believed the war should be fought to the bitter end—even if this meant the mass suicide of the Japanese people. To these people, the men who espoused peace were objects of hatred. They were constantly watched by the Kempei, the Japanese secret police. Their lives were in danger. But to the emperor, to his foreign minister Togo, and to Prince Konoye, there had to be an alternative. The search for peace was becoming more desperate with each bomb dropped on a Japanese city. And the bombs were dropping every day.

The cables sitting on Sato’s desk in Moscow represented Togo’s latest efforts to get the Russians on board. Konoye was still waiting to leave Tokyo. Again and again, Togo urged Sato to persuade the Russians to grant the prince an audience. But the Russians were stalling. Just three days ago, on July 13, Sato had met Alexander Lozovsky, the Russian deputy foreign minister, in the Kremlin. He had presented Lozovsky with a letter directly from the emperor, requesting consent to Konoye’s mission. Lozovsky had responded evasively. The Soviet government, he said, was unclear about the terms of the visit. They needed greater clarification. Moreover, he added, all the key Soviet ministers were leaving that very night for Potsdam. A decision would have to wait.

Sato returned to his office, dejected. Behind Lozovsky’s diplomatic niceties lay a stark and simple truth: the Russians were not interested. The sixty-three-year-old diplomat had been in the game too long not to recognize the realities facing his country. He understood the world outside Japan perhaps better than anybody. He had served as ambassador in innumerable European capitals. He was a tiny man, barely five feet tall, but his capacity for plain speaking was both legendary and atypically Japanese. He had never liked this war, and he did not like it now. Togo’s cables were a step in the right direction, but they did not go far enough. They were too tentative, and they missed the point. There was only one way to make peace in Sato’s mind: unconditional surrender. Sato had already explained this to Togo in his last cable. “The war,” he had written, “has brought us to a real extremity. The government should make the great decision.” If his government did not make the great decision, the consequences for Japan would be terrible. But not even Sato could imagine just how terrible.

IN HIS apartment across the lake from Truman’s villa in Babelsberg, Henry Stimson examined the files on his desk. The American secretary of war was seventy-seven years old and his eyes were not what they used to be, but the message in the files was clear enough. Each one was headed “MAGIC” DIPLOMATIC SUMMARY with a number and a date. Inside each was a sheaf of typewritten papers: a carefully decoded, meticulously translated copy of every secret cable Shigenori Togo and Naotake Sato were sending to each other across the world.

The Americans had long since broken the Japanese diplomatic codes. They were now following every move of the game. Togo’s drive for Russian mediation, Sato’s failures with Lozovsky, all the machinations of this desperate telegraphic communication were laid bare and exposed. Every two or three days, the “Magic” summaries were updated and sent to the president and his key advisers, including the secretary of war. The question was, what to make of them?

As he sat at his desk on that summer’s morning in July, Stimson cut a curiously incongruous impression for a secretary of war. He looked every inch the old-school gentleman, almost the paradigm of old-fashioned American values, with his carefully combed white hair and fine, aristocratic features. Yet this man, born just two years after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, had spent the war years nursing the most revolutionary weapon in history. The career diplomat who had been secretary of war in 1911 under President Taft was today one of the key architects of the atomic bomb. He was the bridge between the president and General Groves, the critical link in a chain of command that stretched from Potsdam all the way back to the bomb makers now waiting for the rain to stop in New Mexico. As chairman of the innocuously named Interim Committee—inaugurated by Stimson to decide America’s atomic policy—he had unhesitatingly recommended using the bomb on the Japanese. A key meeting of the committee had taken place in Stimson’s Pentagon office on May 31, just six weeks ago. Its eight core members were drawn from a mix of leading government figures and distinguished scientists—men who had been associated with the bomb project almost since its inception. Included was the president’s own special representative, Jimmy Byrnes, the tough, hard-line South Carolinian who would shortly be appointed Truman’s secretary of state and would later accompany him to Potsdam. A four-man scientific panel was also invited, one of whose members was Oppenheimer. The military were there, too: General George Marshall, the chief of staff, perhaps the most powerful figure in the U.S. Army; and of course General Groves. An interesting addition was Arthur Page, head of public relations at AT & T. Even at this stage, the publicity impact of the bomb was a central concern.

The committee’s conclusions had been blunt and uncompromising. Stimson, with typical concision, summed them up: Japan, he said, should be bombed without warning. The target should not concentrate on a civilian area, but it should be chosen to “make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Nobody pointed out the possible contradiction inherent in these two statements. Not even when James Conant, the president of Harvard, suggested that “the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Nothing was said about the families of those workers. The alternative of first demonstrating the bomb to the enemy was discussed just once—over lunch. It was rejected. There was always the danger the Japanese might fail to be impressed, especially if the device turned out to be a dud.

The following day, at the end of another session of the committee, Byrnes reported its conclusions to the president. Truman accepted its findings. “While reluctant to use this weapon,” recalled Byrnes later, he “saw no way of avoiding it.” A critical step had been taken toward the final order to drop the bomb; and it was Stimson who had helped to make it happen.

But Stimson also hated the bomb. In the notes to his opening speech at the May 31 meeting, he described it as a Frankenstein monster that could devour mankind. Its very existence threatened the civilized values of the world he had grown up in, and loved. With remarkable acuity for a man of his generation, he grasped the essential point about the bomb: that it changed everything, even the very nature of man’s relationship to the universe. If there were the remotest chance of not using it, it would be inhuman not to seize it. Perhaps the pile of secret cables now sitting on his desk offered just that chance.

Unlike almost all the politicians and diplomats who surrounded the president, Stimson knew his Orient. As a former governorgeneral of the Philippines, he had visited Japan twice in the 1920s. He did not belong to the ranks of Americans who saw the Japanese as a monolithic race of half-alien fanatics. He believed there were liberal elements in the country, civilized, decent people like himself who were sickened by the killing and who wanted a way out. The Japa-nese foreign minister’s pleas offered a tantalizing glimpse into that possibility. “His Majesty,” Togo had cabled Sato four days earlier on July 12, “is deeply reluctant to have any further blood lost on both sides. It is his desire for the welfare of humanity to restore peace with all possible speed.” Unconditional surrender was the single obstacle to that peace. Should the Allies continue to demand it, Japan had no alternative but to “fight on with all its strength for the honor and existence of the Motherland.”

Even now, hours before the bomb was due to be tested in New Mexico, a window for peace might exist. Everything depended on the terms the Japanese were offered. The key, as Stimson understood very well, was their god. Guarantee them their emperor, he believed, and they would surely give the Americans their victory. Nor was he alone in his thinking. His assistant secretary, John McCloy, pressed the same point: “We should have our heads examined,” he said, “if we don’t consider a political solution.” The undersecretary of the navy, Ralph Bard, had even resigned from the Interim Committee over the issue. “The stakes are so tremendous,” he wrote in his resignation note on June 27. “The only way to find out is to try it out.”

In the next few days, Truman would issue his ultimatum to the Japanese government. McCloy had already drafted a clause that permitted postwar Japan a “constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty.” Stimson now had to persuade the president to accept that clause—and quickly. Let the Japanese keep their emperor, he had urged Truman in a memorandum just two weeks before, and “it would substantially add to the chances of acceptance.” No invasion, no bomb, no monster.

Stimson was sleeping badly and he had pains in his chest and he was worried about his wife, Mabel, who had recently had a serious fall. But his duty was clear. The old reluctant secretary of war would pursue the peace he prayed was still possible. Before Frankenstein’s monster devoured them all.

FIVE THOUSAND miles away, some of the men who had created that monster were also fighting to destroy it. As the bomb makers in New Mexico waited through the stormy night, a Manhattan Project scientist in the University of Chicago was desperately circulating a petition among his colleagues for signatures. The substance of the petition was a passionately argued appeal to stop atom bombs from ever being used. What made it unusual was that it was addressed directly to the president himself.

Its author was Leo Szilard, a squat, pot-bellied, forceful fortyseven-year-old Hungarian Jewish exile, a brilliant nuclear physicist who lived his life out of suitcases and believed he had a mission to change the world. Szilard’s opposition to the bomb was positively messianic, but what made it especially ironic was that on September 12, 1933, just twelve years earlier, he had first conceived the idea of the atomic bomb in the time it took for a traffic light on a London street to change from red to green.

The idea horrified him. What horrified him even more over the following decade was that the Germans might have had the same idea. By 1939, he was instrumental in persuading the United States government to build their own bomb. With Albert Einstein, he drafted a letter to Roosevelt warning of the acute Nazi danger. There was evidence, he wrote, that the Germans were developing an atomic program. Hitler would have no compunction about using nuclear weapons. The only answer to a German bomb was an American bomb. Roosevelt was persuaded. “Pa,” he said to his secretary, Brigadier General Edwin “Pa” Watson, “this requires action!” The driving force for what later became the Manhattan Project was in place: it rested, fundamentally, on the possibilities of a German nuclear threat. Japan, with only a very fledgling atomic program, never entered into it.

By the spring of 1945, all that had changed. The Germans were effectively defeated. It was also clear that they did not have an atomic bomb. Hitler’s loathing for what he called “Jewish physics” had blinded him to the temptations of almost unlimited power. The Manhattan Project’s own agents had swept into Germany behind the Allied troops: the Nazis, they discovered, were years behind the Americans. At the very moment the scientists in New Mexico were busy preparing for Trinity, the whole reason for having nuclear weapons was fast disintegrating. Or so it seemed to Leo Szilard. From being the bomb’s greatest apologist—indeed, one of its prime movers—he suddenly became its implacable enemy. He crusaded to stop it altogether. And other scientists joined his crusade.

Most of them were centered at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory—MetLab, as it was known—which back in 1942 had built the world’s first chain-reacting atomic pile in the university’s squash courts. Unlike their peers in Los Alamos, they now had less work to do, and consequently more time to think. As the bomb neared completion, the moral case against its use became increasingly urgent. Szilard drove them on. With two of his MetLab colleagues, he attempted in May to persuade Jimmy Byrnes not to go ahead with the weapon—not even to test it. If the Russians knew it worked, he argued, they would throw all their resources into building it themselves. An unlimited arms race would be the result, bringing with it the possible destruction of the human race. Byrnes dismissed his claims. “Rattling the bomb,” Szilard remembered him saying quite openly, would make Russia “more manageable.” Szilard tried again: in June he sat on a committee chaired by another Chicago scientist, James Franck, to explore the bomb’s social and political implications. Their concluding report proposed that—at the very least—the weapon be demonstrated “before the eyes of the representatives of all the United Nations on the desert or a barren island.” The report was sent to Stimson’s office. His assistant, George Harrison, took care of it. The evidence suggests that Stimson himself never saw it. “We waited and waited,” said one of its authors, Eugene Rabinowitch, “and we had the feeling we could as well have dropped it into Lake Michigan.” So Szilard tried yet another tack: he attempted to persuade Oppenheimer to join his crusade. Oppenheimer turned him down. “The atom bomb is shit,” he said. “It will make a bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.” It was an astonishing remark. Perhaps Oppenheimer was simply less prophetic than Szilard. Perhaps he was blinded by the intellectual challenge of actually building an atomic bomb—what he once called a “technically sweet problem.” Or perhaps he was seduced by the trappings of power and his own ambition. He preferred, in the end, to remain king of his own castle, confirming the recommendations of Stimson’s Interim Committee that the bomb be used directly and without demonstration against Japan. Szilard’s case was lost before he even started it.

But still he did not stop. Now constantly tailed by Groves’s agents—his phones were tapped, his letters read, his every movement watched and recorded—he threw all his energies into one final effort: to make a direct appeal to the president himself. Once again he pleaded that the bomb not be used. His words resonate with frightening prescience. “A nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction,” he wrote, “may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.” He had collected sixty-nine signatures—most of MetLab’s leading physicists, and some of its biologists and chemists—when Oppenheimer and Groves were waiting for Jack Hubbard’s final weather report in Trinity’s base camp. The era of devastation was only a few hours away, but Leo Szilard was by now so distrusted that he was not even allowed to know today was the day.

FIVE

Monday, July 16, 2:08 A.M. Base Camp, Trinity Test Site

BY THE TIME Hubbard arrived at base camp for his 2 A.M. meeting, he was eight minutes late. He was also drenched. The full force of the storm had just hit the camp. Within seconds, the rain had churned the dust into viscous pools of black mud. He was barely out of his jeep before Groves immediately tore into him. “What the hell is wrong with the weather?” were his first words, as if it were all Hubbard’s fault. He demanded a specific time when the test could go ahead. Hubbard began to explain the meteorological processes behind the storm. Groves abruptly cut him off. He hadn’t asked for explanations, he said; he’d asked for a specific time. Hubbard argued he was trying to give him both. He believed the storm would collapse with the first rays of the sun. The weather should be clear by dawn. By now, Groves’s blood was up. Even Oppenheimer—himself hardly a model of philosophic calm—tried to pacify him. Hubbard was convinced Groves was going to call off the test altogether. But he did not. Instead he ordered Hubbard to sign his own forecast. “You’d better be right on this,” Groves told him, “or I will hang you.”

A few minutes later, Groves phoned the governor of New Mexico, rousing him from a deep sleep. As always, he was blunt. He told the governor he might have to declare martial law during the night. Forcible evacuations could well be necessary throughout the state. The two men had discussed this possibility a few weeks previously. Then it seemed remote. Now the dangers were all too real. If the shot went ahead, nobody could predict the outcome. Bleary-eyed and half-awake, the governor knew better than to argue. Groves was running this show.

He was, after all, in his element. This was what he did best. Despite the pressures he was under, he did not break. He was able to make decisions when everybody else around him, including the director of his laboratory, was unable to do so. In a curious way, it was almost as if he reveled in this moment—Leslie R. Groves’s finest hour, when the fate of the world rested on his shoulders. In this hour, he could bludgeon governors of states and move whole communities from one end of New Mexico to another. Groves was never afraid of power, and just now his power was arguably greater than that of any man alive. His fingers were in every pie—scientific, political, and military—and over the next three weeks they would stretch across the world: from this wilderness in deepest New Mexico, to Potsdam in war-battered Germany, and finally all the way to Japan.

He was powerful, but he was also careful. Perhaps regrettably in Groves’s view, America still had a free press. He was acutely aware of the potential public relations disaster now hanging directly over his head. In just a few hours, half of New Mexico might go up in smoke, taking with it a number of the world’s leading scientists. Not even Groves could put the lid on that story. It was essential to be prepared. And typically, he was. Sitting in his Foggy Bottom safe back in Washington, along with the classified documents and the chocolate bars, were four different press releases covering four different outcomes to the test. A reporter attached to his staff had prepared them as far back as May, two months earlier. Each described an accident in which a remotely located ammunition dump had blown up by mistake. They went all the way from this:

Several inquiries have been received concerning a heavy explosion which occurred on the Alamagordo Air Base reservation this morning. A remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosive exploded. The cause is as yet unknown but an official investigation is now proceeding. There was no loss of life nor injury to anyone and the property damage outside of the explosives magazine itself was negligible.

To this:

The premature explosion of material intended for use as an improved war weapon resulted today in the death of several persons on the reservation, including some of the scientists engaged in the test.

Among the dead were:

(Names)

As is normally the case with considerable amounts of high explosive, the effects were noticeable for several miles.

Of course, there was also another possibility: that the bomb failed to go off at all. It was a fear Groves lived with every day of his life. He even joked about it from time to time, in one of those jokes that was not entirely funny. “If the gadget proves to be a dud,” he told a colleague in the days running up to Trinity, “I will spend my life so far back in a Fort Leavenworth dungeon they’ll have to pump sunlight in.”

TWENTY MILES northwest of Ground Zero, up on Compania Hill, the reporter who wrote those press releases sat in a bus and watched the rain dripping down the windows. His name was William L. Laurence, and he was here to write up the biggest story of his career. Just two days ago, on July 14, Laurence had arrived at Los Alamos on the final stage of his journey to Trinity. From there he mailed a letter to his editor at the New York Times. “The story,” he wrote, “is much bigger than I could imagine. When it breaks, it will be an eighth-day wonder, a sort of Second Coming of Christ yarn. It will need about twenty columns on the day it breaks.”

Laurence was another of Groves’s finds. A tough, pugnacious, tirelessly energetic journalist with a thick Slavic accent and a jutting chin, he was virtually a one-man incarnation of the American Dream. He had come to the United States from Lithuania in 1905 as a penniless refugee, worked his way through Harvard Law School by teaching the sons of the rich, and had since become one of the country’s most brilliant and successful science reporters. With one Pulitzer Prize already behind him, he turned his attention, in September 1940, to the revolutionary new science of atomic physics. The result was an article for the Saturday Evening Post with the innocuous title, “The Atom Gives Up.” It was an astonishingly prescient piece. In a few choice paragraphs, it predicted a world in which the almost limitless possibilities of atomic power might be harnessed for man’s benefit—or his destruction.

At the time, nobody appeared to pay the article any attention. It simply disappeared into oblivion. Only later did Laurence discover that the FBI had pulled that particular edition of the Saturday Evening Post out of every library across the United States. And they did not stop there. They also investigated every individual who asked to see it. The long arm of what was to become the Manhattan Project already ran the length and breadth of the country. It was only a matter of time before its spotlight finally turned on the author. Laurence knew too much. He was far too dangerous to leave outside the nuclear fold. So they brought him inside, to work for them. And the man who made that decision was General Groves.

By then, Bill Laurence was working for the New York Times as a science reporter. Groves made an appointment to meet the managing editor, Edwin L. James. For extra clout, he brought his chief of intelligence and counterintelligence along with him. As always, he was direct. He told James the project needed Laurence and it needed him for several months. He also said Laurence would continue on the Times payroll for security reasons and that stories should occasionally appear under his byline to suggest he was still actually writing for the paper. Groves did not state any of this as an offer. There was no appeal. Laurence, in effect, was to be requisitioned.

It was an inspired choice. Laurence’s selection suited everybody. He turned out to be the most dedicated apologist of nuclear power the Manhattan Project could ever have wished for. His zeal for atoms was positively messianic. He was never happier than when describing all those cosmic fires that man’s genius would spread over the face of the earth. On a more mundane level, he was also perfectly happy to draft as many press releases as Groves could throw at him. Months before the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Laurence had written the draft presidential statement to be released to the press immediately after that event. Almost the only word left blank was the one he did not yet know: the name of the city.

Laurence’s choice was also good news for the New York Times. They were guaranteed the scoop of the century, even though they had no clue what would be revealed. On May 17, 1945, Laurence had written a top secret three-page memo to General Groves entitled “Plans for Future Articles on Manhattan District Project.” All of these would of course be “subject to approval,” by which Laurence presumably did not mean the approval of his editors at the New York Times. There were twenty-nine articles listed, and they ranged from subjects like the early history of the Manhattan Project to an eyewitness account of the first combat use of a nuclear weapon. This last was a little premature since the first test bomb was still two months away from demonstration, but Groves had agreed in principle. Laurence would certainly get to ride one of the missions to Japan and witness firsthand just what his dream atomic power could do to a real city.

By the time of the test, a significant number of these articles were already written and filed away in Groves’s safe. Now, as he sat in the bus on Compania Hill, Laurence began to take notes. It was 2:30 in the morning. To the southeast, twenty miles away, he could see a single searchlight flashing in the sky. He knew what that was: Ground Zero.

A shortwave radio linked Compania Hill to base camp, but it kept shorting out. One of Los Alamos’s most brilliant physicists, Richard Feynman, was trying to fix it with the help of a flashlight. Until or unless he succeeded, none of the scientists up there had any idea when—or if—the bomb would fire. Laurence fumed silently in the shelter of the bus. If only they had allowed him to get closer. Twenty miles—he was too far away. Even if the thing went off, he would never see it properly. He was out of the loop. The thought that he might miss the biggest scoop of his career was enough to drive him mad. After all, hadn’t Groves read that memo properly? It was all there, in black and white. Item number 23: “An eyewitness account (in case eyewitness survives) of the first test with bombs.” He had even written his own obituary.

SOMETIME IN the night, Don Hornig finally got his telephone call. It was his boss Kistiakowsky, telling Hornig he could come down at last. Gratefully, Hornig shut his unread thriller, stood up, and squeezed past the bomb. He stepped onto the top rung of the ladder. The steel tower dropped beneath him in the rain, its wet girders and cables gleaming in the powerful beams of the searchlight Bill Laurence also saw from his bus window. He looked back at the bomb for the last time. There it sat, inert, cold, quiet, skulking in the darkness of its tin home. Hornig turned away, and began to descend.

At the bottom he climbed into a jeep, huddling under the canvas cover as protection against the rain. Cold and wet, he raced off through the sagebrush, back to the warmth and coffee and companionship of the base camp mess, where Fermi and his fellowscientists were still taking bets on whether the bomb up there would destroy the earth in the final minutes before dawn.

SIX

Monday, July 16, early hours of the morning Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, San Francisco Bay

TWELVE HUNDRED miles northwest of Ground Zero, in the predawn darkness of one of the United States’ largest naval bases, two army trucks drove onto a wharf and pulled up alongside the USS Indianapolis, a heavy cruiser. A team of heavily armed marines jumped down and took up position around them, weapons held ready. The flaps at the backs of the trucks were opened. From the decks above, sailors stared down. Loading operations did not normally take place at this time of the night. Whatever was in those trucks was obviously very unusual.

From the first truck, a wooden crate emerged. It was big, perhaps five feet high, five feet wide, and fifteen feet long. A gantry crane on board the Indianapolis secured it, then lifted it up into the night sky. Once over the ship’s side, it was carefully set down in the hangar ordinarily used for observation planes. Some of the sailors took guesses what was inside it. The running bets were on toilet rolls for General MacArthur. Or maybe Rita Hayworth’s underwear.

The crate attracted all the attention. Almost nobody noticed the object that emerged from the second truck. It was hardly worth comment: just a bucket-shaped cylinder less than two feet high and eighteen inches in diameter. The only odd thing was that two sailors were needed to carry it. It was suspended from a crowbar on their shoulders, and it was obviously very heavy. Two army officers followed them up the gangplank onto the ship. There was something a little odd about them too. They were dressed in artillery uniform, but they appeared to be wearing their insignia upside down.

The two officers followed the sailors and the bucket into the flag lieutenant’s cabin, where it was welded to the floor. The sailors then left. One of the officers removed an instrument from his valise and held it next to the bucket. It began clicking slowly and regularly, like a heartbeat.

The ship’s captain, Charles Butler McVay, waited on the bridge. In a little over six hours, he was due to depart. Everything about this mission unnerved McVay. Only the day before, he had been abruptly summoned to Admiral William Purnell’s headquarters in San Francisco. The admiral had introduced him to a lean, balding navy captain in his forties called William “Deak” Parsons. The two men came straight to the point. They ordered McVay to prepare his ship immediately for a highly secret mission. He was to sail at maximum speed across the Pacific. His destination was Tinian Island, a tiny speck in the ocean 1,500 miles south of Japan. The ship would travel alone and without escort. It would also carry two pieces of very special cargo.

McVay was not told what the cargo was. He was simply informed that it was more important than anything else on his ship, including the lives of its men. If the ship went down, the first lifeboat went to the cargo. He was also told that every day he saved on the trip would cut the length of the war by just that much. Then he was dismissed.

As McVay now waited on the bridge, one of the artillery officers with the upside-down insignia climbed up. He told McVay that the bucket was secure. He also said it was padlocked, and that he would keep the only key. McVay studied him a moment. “I didn’t think we were going to use bacteriological weapons in this war,” he said. The officer made no reply. Then he left the bridge.

In New Mexico, the time was 3 A.M. General Groves had just threatened to hang Jack Hubbard. Don Hornig was sitting down over coffee and powdered eggs in the base camp canteen. The final pieces were locking into place for the test of the world’s first atomic bomb. But in Hunter’s Point naval base, a very different drama was taking place. In these quiet, dark hours before dawn, preparations were rapidly moving ahead for the world’s second atomic bomb. The one they would drop on a city.

The two men with the upside-down insignia sitting over their bucket in the flag lieutenant’s cabin were not artillery officers at all. Their names were James Nolan and Robert Furman, and they were working for Groves. The big wooden crate sitting in the Indianapolis’s hangar did not contain toilet rolls or underwear. It contained a key component for that bomb, a specially designed high-velocity cannon weighing half a ton. The lead-lined bucket welded to the deck of the two men’s cabin did not contain bacteriological agents. It contained approximately half of the 141 pounds of weapons-grade uranium that would explode over Hiroshima in three weeks’ time.

With less than three hours to go before the first bomb was tested, the second bomb was already on its way.

AT 0400 THE WINDS at Ground Zero began to veer in the direction Jack Hubbard had been praying for: to the northeast. The rains also eased, and the thick clouds scudding overhead at last began to break. The weather was not perfect, but for Hubbard it was acceptable. No doubt he could feel General Groves’s noose hanging over his head. At 0445 he discussed his findings with Kenneth Bainbridge, the test director. After a hurried telephone conference with Groves and Oppenheimer, the final decision was made. Zero hour was set for 0530, just half an hour away. The test was on.

In the concrete control bunker five and a half miles south of Ground Zero named S10,000, Bainbridge inserted a key into a padlocked metal box. Inside were switches for the bomb’s arming and timing circuits. One by one Bainbridge flipped them on. The final switch controlled the bomb’s firing circuit. From here, cables snaked back through the miles of sagebrush to the tower, then up the steel girders to the tin hut until they reached Don Hornig’s X-unit bolted to the rear of the bomb. Bainbridge flicked the switch on, closing the circuit. The electrical pathway to the X-unit was now clear. The bomb was armed.

The control bunker at S10,000 was a small room, just twenty feet by twenty feet, but each square foot was crammed with instruments, dials, oscilloscopes, gauges, cables, knobs, boxes, panels, racks of fuses, half-eaten sandwiches, and empty coffee mugs scattered in haphazard confusion on desks, tables, even on the floor. Despite the electrical equipment there were puddles from the rain everywhere. With all this paraphernalia, there was almost no room for the dozen or so scientists. In one corner, Hornig and Bainbridge squeezed together over their apparatus. In another, Kistiakowsky sat hunched at a table over his dials. Oppenheimer stood by the door, a thin, fragile, exhausted figure, looking up at the sky. Although there was still some mist in the west, the skies to the east were now clearing rapidly. The winds were light and gentle. It was even possible to see a few stars.

The time was now 0510. In a tiny cubicle to the side of the bunker, a middle-aged man sat holding a microphone. His name was Sam Allison, and his role was about to become one of the most important in this test. In a moment, he would begin the twentyminute countdown toward zero. For the last time he checked his watch. Just a few days ago, his wife had collected it from a repair shop in Santa Fe. The watch had sentimental value for Allison. His wife knew he wanted it urgently. He did not tell her why.

Allison switched on the microphone. Outside, the loudspeakers hissed into life. He began to count. Suddenly his voice was drowned by the deafening strains of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Radio KCBA, broadcasting from Delano, California, had just begun its morning Voice of America show. Somehow its wavelength had crossed with Trinity’s. It was too late to do anything about it now. As the scientists, guards, and radiation monitors huddled in their bunkers to the north, west, and south of Ground Zero, Allison’s voice and the National Anthem echoed in strange harmony across the lonely desert. Meanwhile in California, KCBA’s listeners would spend the next twenty minutes hearing a man counting backward.

AT BASE CAMP, General Groves watched the single searchlight playing on the northern horizon. He and Oppenheimer had already agreed to witness the test from separate positions. The program might survive the death of either one of them. It could not survive both. Not far from Groves was Philip Morrison, the man who had carried the bomb’s plutonium core in its shock-absorbing suitcase all the way from Los Alamos. Now he was busy relaying Allison’s countdown to base camp from a sound truck. For a moment he stopped, reaching down to pull his socks up and trouser legs down as far as they would go. He wanted to be sure no part of his skin was directly exposed to whatever the bomb out there threw into the sky—or, more precisely, at him. He knew that 360 highly radioactive isotopes of plutonium would be created at the instant of fission. He also knew the potential hazards of ultraviolet light traveling directly toward him at 186,000 miles per second. The trousers and socks may not have been much, but they were better than nothing.

All around Morrison, men were now burrowing themselves into trenches. Most of them had brought along welder’s goggles or pieces of strongly tinted glass. Everyone had been advised to lie facedown away from Ground Zero and not look up when the bomb exploded. The light was sure to be brilliant, but nobody could be sure just how brilliant. One man chose to ignore this advice. Enrico Fermi was standing on a mound to get a better view. Now he was rapidly tearing up pieces of paper and making swift calculations on his slide rule. He smiled at Herb Anderson, a fellow scientist. “Just watch,” he said. “I’ll know the yield before anyone.”

Up on Compania Hill, twenty miles northwest of Ground Zero, Bill Laurence watched the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller smear suntan lotion over his face and arms. Others were following his example. For the past two years, Teller had been working on what was euphemistically known in Los Alamos as the “Super”: the hydrogen bomb. The sight disturbed Laurence. Perhaps Teller knew something the New York Times reporter did not. It was eerie to see some of the world’s most celebrated scientists wearing sunglasses and rubbing sun cream on themselves in the pitch darkness of the desert night.

Nearby, Richard Feynman had finally managed to get the shortwave radio working for a few minutes. Then it suddenly died again. This time nothing could coax it back into life. But at least everybody up on Compania knew the test was now very close. Laurence was still irritated they had stuck him so far away. From this distance—twenty miles—he would never observe anything useful. He settled himself uncomfortably on the hard ground. One of the project’s scientists called him softly from behind: “Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll see all you need to. We want our chronicler to survive.”

To the left and right of Laurence, all along the ridge, men lay facedown and shivered in the predawn cold. Most of them huddled together, as if for comfort. One man, however, remained apart, sitting alone on a small hillock. He was a curious-looking individual, with his thin, owlish, bespectacled face and bulging forehead. He hardly spoke to anyone, and when he did, it was with a distinctly foreign accent. But everybody knew who he was. In fact, throughout Los Alamos he was renowned: as an enthusiastic three-step waltzer, a jazz lover, an extremely reliable babysitter, as well as one of the most brilliant mathematicians on the project. The one thing nobody knew was that he was also a Soviet spy. His name was Klaus Fuchs, and he had already fed the Soviets information about the program seven times, most recently on June 2, just six weeks ago. Truman and Churchill’s chat this very morning in that sunny Babelsberg drawing room five and a half thousand miles away rested largely on a fantasy. What they agreed to tell or not tell Stalin about the bomb was irrelevant. Thanks to Fuchs, he knew most of it already.

Now Fuchs fixed his welder’s goggles over his eyes and waited to see what he could tell the Russians next.

FIVE MILES above the desert, two B-29 observation planes flew in wide circles, the men on board straining to catch a glimpse of the searchlight at Ground Zero far below. At the height they were flying there was still an overcast, and it was almost impossible to see anything. The lingering aftereffects of the night’s storm had also created a bizarre spectacle. A strange blue fire appeared to burn around the two planes, streaming over the wings and past the windows, leaving a luminous wake in the sky. At times it looked as if the bombers were riding incandescent waves of blue light. It was called Saint Elmo’s fire, and it occasionally happened after a major storm. But to the men on the planes it was still unsettling, especially now, in the final minutes before zero.

One of the observers staring through the windows at the light was Deak Parsons, the balding naval officer who had interviewed the captain of the Indianapolis the day before. An outstanding ballistics expert, he was perhaps the key figure in the development of the bomb as a droppable, deliverable weapon. He was a quiet, serious, technically brilliant man who enjoyed the complete confidence of both Oppenheimer and Groves. So much so that they had entrusted him with a monumental responsibility. In three weeks’ time, he would sit in a B-29 just like this except with one difference: the bomb would be in the bomb bay and not on the ground. It would be Parsons’s job to babysit it all the way to Japan.

Tonight was the dress rehearsal. Parsons needed to see what an atomic explosion looked like from 25,000 feet. As the B-29 slowly descended toward the clouds, he could hear Allison’s countdown over the headphones. It was 0523. The big bomber banked gently to the northeast, still trailing a beautiful blue glow in the sky.

AT ZERO minus five minutes, a short siren blast wailed across the desert. Seconds later, a green rocket flared up into the sky.

Through the loudspeakers, the hollow strains of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings mingled with Sam Allison’s countdown. Voice of America’s early morning classical music show was now in full swing.

All over the Jornada, radiation monitors sat at their shelters or in their trucks, listening to the countdown over the radio. Soldiers detailed to supervise possible evacuations smoked last cigarettes as they waited outside the lonely desert towns. Cameramen and photographers made final adjustments to their equipment, polishing lenses, checking exposures with their flashlights. To the east, over the Little Burros, the faintest gleam of light was now discernible. Dawn was not far away.

Outside the control bunker at S10,000, armed guards sat in jeeps, their motors idling, ready to evacuate the scientists at an instant. Inside the bunker, Don Hornig stared at a control panel in front of him. There were four lights on it. Right now they were all blank. Exactly forty-five seconds before zero, his colleague Joe McKibben would throw the switch closing the automatic timing circuits for the bomb. Once Hornig saw his four lights go red, he would know the X-unit was charged, ready to disgorge its five and a half thousand volts to the bomb’s sixty-four detonators. After that, if anything went wrong, the only way to stop the bomb from blowing up was to cut the power to the X-unit.

Next to Hornig was a knife switch controlling the power. He figured he had perhaps half a second to react if there was a problem. Half a second to abort the world’s first nuclear bomb. It was enough to make anyone a little crazy. He turned to Oppenheimer and made a joke. “What’s likely to happen, Oppie,” he said, “is that at minus five seconds I’ll panic and say—Gentlemen, this can’t go on—and then I’ll pull the switch.”

For a long moment Oppenheimer stared at him. “Are you all right?” he asked.

AT ZERO minus two minutes, the siren wailed again, a slow, stretched howl that seemed to hang forever in the desert air.

At zero minus one minute, a red rocket spat up into the sky. It was 0528.

Philip Morrison, the man who had ferried the bomb’s core all the way from Los Alamos, hunkered down on the ground. The camp looked like a place of the dead. Shadowy bodies lay everywhere, immobile and silent. It felt as if everybody was collectively holding his breath, waiting for whatever it was out there by the tower and the sweeping searchlight to do its worst. Morrison wondered what that worst would be. Tonight it was a test, at best a beautiful, brilliantly conceived scientific experiment. In just a few days, perhaps, it would be the real thing. Morrison was not the only scientist who almost wished the bomb would fail. Like many, he was caught in a trap of desire and horror. The physicist in him wanted to see the experiment succeed. The human in him wanted to see it fail. Sometimes, like Leo Szilard, he even questioned whether it was necessary at all. Now that the threat of a Nazi bomb had disappeared, its purpose was uncertain. The only certainty was that the power they were about to unleash in the next minute would change the world forever.

ON SANDIA PEAK, 110 miles to the north, Lilli Hornig watched the first rays of the sun touch the mountains to the east. The storm had disappeared. It was going to be a lovely day. The test had obviously been scrubbed, she thought. They would only fire in the dark. She dumped her sleeping bag in the trunk of her car, quite forgetting that up here at 10,000 feet the sun rose earlier than it did down on the wide plains below.

FORTY-FIVE seconds before zero, exactly on cue, Joe McKibben pulled the switch triggering the automatic timing sequence. All the circuits to the bomb now closed. Don Hornig stared at his panel, waiting for the four red lights to glow. Right behind stood Kistiakowsky, looking over his shoulder. His entire reputation, not to mention a month’s salary, now rested on whether the troubled X-unit would finally work. Hunched against the racks of equipment to their left was Thomas Farrell, the general who had felt the plutonium core in his rubber gloves two days earlier. A First World War veteran, all he could think of now was how much worse this was than going over the top. Over in base camp, General Groves’s very last thought was what would happen if the countdown got down to zero, and nothing happened.

The red lights on Hornig’s panel flicked on. The X-unit was energized and ready. His eyes were glued to the panel. His hand still rested on the knife switch, waiting for the word to abort. Allison’s countdown passed the ten-second mark. Everybody in the shelter braced himself. Farrell noticed how Oppenheimer scarcely breathed. In the last moment he suddenly grasped a beam, as if to steady himself. Somebody heard him murmur, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.”

And then, in the final seconds before zero, a strange new noise filled the air. Only later would the men who were there learn what it was. It was the noise of frogs, hundreds upon hundreds of them, mating in the dawn. They had come up from the surface after the long night of rain, slipping into the cool, sandy puddles. In the instant before the bomb ripped open the sky, the only sound in the desert was the sound of life in the act of creation.

FIFTY MILES north of Ground Zero, an eighteen-year-old girl was traveling in the front seat of a car next to her brother-in-law, Joe Willis. The girl’s name was Georgia Green, and Joe was driving her to an early-morning music lesson in Albuquerque. They still had some way to go. As they passed the town of Lemitar along an empty Highway 85, a flash of extraordinary brilliance suddenly filled the landscape. Georgia grabbed her brother-in-law’s arm. “What was that?” she cried.

Joe stared at her. Georgia Green was blind.

SEVEN

Monday, July 16, 5:29 A.M. Ground Zero, New Mexico

IT ROSE from the desert like a second sun, a searing, brilliant, expanding ball of fire, and it struck terror into everyone who saw it. In the first millisecond it resembled something horrifyingly alien, a giant, fleshy, brainlike shape with shooting points of fire, and the skies split before it. In that same millisecond, the very instant of its birth, the temperature at its core was 60 million degrees centigrade, ten thousand times hotter than the surface of the sun, and its blinding flash was far brighter. It bathed the mountains and the desert with a beauty and a clarity that nobody who witnessed it would ever forget. Its impact was monstrous and elemental. Within seconds, the brainlike substance had sucked thousands of tons of sand, dust, sagebrush, juniper bushes, rattlesnakes, jackrabbits, mating frogs, bits of pulverized steel tower, and every kind of organic and inorganic matter from the earth’s bowels into a mammoth, rapidly expanding radioactive cloud. It swelled up into the sky, punching through the clouds at 5,000 feet a minute, climbing higher than the highest mountains until it seemed to touch the edge of space. To Bill Laurence, twenty miles away on Compania Hill, it felt as if he were present at the Creation of the universe, the moment when God said, “Let there be light.”

Those who were closer felt the impact of that light much more forcefully. To Isidor Rabi, one of the scientists at base camp thirteen miles away, it blasted, pounced, and bored its way like a drill into the backs of his eyeballs. It was a shocking, painful, visceral sensation he prayed would stop but that seemed to last forever. In fact it lasted two seconds. To Philip Morrison, also at base camp, it felt like a blinding, burning heat, as if somebody had suddenly opened a hot oven inches from his face. To General Farrell, watching even closer from the control bunker, it was stupendous, magnificent, and terrifying, an act of blasphemy in which puny man had dared tamper with the forces of the Almighty. “The long-hairs have let it get away from them,” he yelled, as the fireball mushroomed into the sky. And for a moment it really did seem as if Fermi’s fears had come true and the world was about to end.

Those first few seconds of the atomic age unrolled in an almost eerie silence. But behind the light came the sound, tearing through the desert at twelve miles a minute, and it arrived, as Farrell would remember for the rest of his life, like the roar of doomsday. A million hammer blows struck the Jornada and the Oscura peaks with a noise that numbed the senses like a physical shock and broke windows 120 miles away. The mountain ranges bounced the sound back and forth across the desert and the ground trembled as in an earthquake. To Bill Laurence it sounded like the first cry of a newborn world. Along with the sound came the shockwave, a hundred billion atmospheres of pressure ripping outward from the core like a hurricane, except this hurricane moved initially at several hundred miles per hour, as fast as a modern passenger jet, battering and blasting everything in its path. Even in the concrete, sandbagged control bunker nearly six miles away several observers were knocked to the ground. One of them was Kistiakowsky. He jumped up and slapped Oppenheimer excitedly on the back. “You owe me ten dollars,” he cried. A dazed Oppenheimer pulled out his wallet. “It’s empty,” he replied, “you’ll have to wait.”

At base camp, the blast wave arrived forty seconds after zero. Standing on his mound, Fermi tossed his pieces of paper directly into it, measuring the distance they were carried on the wind. He grabbed a slide rule and rapidly calculated the size of the blast: the equivalent, he found, of 10,000 tons of TNT, almost five times the total weight of bombs dropped on Dresden on the night of its destruction. It was a brilliantly virtuoso guess, but it was also wrong. In fact, the yield was twice as great. It would need 5,000 bombers, each carrying a full load of conventional explosives, to match it. And all this awesome, inhuman power came from a piece of plutonium very slightly larger than a tennis ball.

Don Hornig had rushed out of the control bunker the instant Allison’s count hit zero. As the flash flooded the desert, he tore up the stairs. Then he looked up. The huge, expanding cloud boiled up into the skies almost directly above him like a mountain growing out of the earth. But the most astonishing spectacle was the colors, a glorious riot of luminescent pinks and blues and greens spilling out of the cloud before themselves unfolding whole spectra of new colors, until the sky became one vast and dazzling fireworks display. It was the most beautiful sight Hornig had ever seen in his life.

All over the Jornada, men cheered and shouted and sang as the pyrotechnic wonders raged above them. Others watched in horror. Henry Linschitz, one of the physicists who had designed the bomb’s detonators, stared in disbelief. My God, he said to himself, we’re going to drop that on a city. Normally sober, rational men were seized by an almost animal passion. On Compania Hill, Bill Laurence observed little groups of scientists suddenly dancing with strange, primitive rhythms, clapping their hands and leaping from the ground as if this were some ancient fire festival or rite of spring. Others elsewhere also reverted to primitive instincts. At base camp, General Groves’s first words were, “We must keep this whole thing quiet.” An engineering officer stared at him: “Sir,” he said, “I think they heard the noise in five states.”

In fact all of southern New Mexico, as well as large swaths of Arizona and western Texas, had heard the blast. In Carrizozo, 40 miles away, several people believed they had just experienced an earthquake, as did a forest ranger near Silver City, 125 miles on the other side of the state to the west. The Smithsonian Observatory on Burro Mountain registered a shock, but something about the vibrations was wrong. They were uniquely and inexplicably different from any other earthquake ever recorded. The brilliant light was witnessed as far as 180 miles away. Lilli Hornig saw it as she switched on the ignition in her car on Sandia Peak. She stared openmouthed through the windshield at the floodlit horizon. Ed Lane, an engineer on the Santa Fe Railroad, saw it as he was approaching El Paso, 70 miles to the south. It looked as if the sun had suddenly risen on the wrong side of the earth. Many others who saw it believed that the end of the world had come. Lewis Ferris, a native of Carrizozo, was terrified for a different reason. He ran up and down the streets yelling that the Japanese had invaded.

ON BOARD the B-29 observation plane, Deak Parsons had slipped on his goggles just before zero, when an intense light suddenly filled the sky. The bomber was twenty-five miles from the tower, heading northeast. Within seconds the seven-tenths cloud cover beneath turned a violent orange-red color, as if lit by a giant bulb from the ground. A red ball of fire burst through the undercast, mushrooming into an enormous multicolored cloud. It raced past the bomber’s altitude of 25,000 feet until it reached more than 40,000 feet—eight miles up into the sky. Everybody on board was hollering over the intercom. Parsons, ever the technocrat, began making notes. In the next forty-eight hours he would be leaving for Tinian Island on the other side of the Pacific, the same destination as the USS Indianapolis carrying its lethal cargo. Within days, he would have to brief bomber crews about the awesome spectacle outside the window. It was important he remember it right. The next time he saw anything like this, it would be over a Japanese city.

AS THE CLOUD topped out in the stratosphere, the air around it ionized, leaving a luminous violet afterglow in the sky. From the ground it looked as if the light were filtered through a purple lens stretching across the sky. It was the final curtain call, and like everything else in this drama, it was both beautiful and frightening. After the elation and the excitement, people were now noticeably quieter. Perhaps it was sheer exhaustion. Or perhaps the realities of what they had just seen were beginning to sink in.

Over the eastern mountains, the real sun now began to rise. It seemed to many a pale imitation of the man-made one. Oppenheimer returned by jeep with General Farrell to base camp. Groves was waiting for him. “I’m proud of you,” he said. “Thank you,” Oppenheimer replied. Farrell said the war was over. “Yes,” said Groves, “after we drop two of these bombs on Japan.”

Oppenheimer sent a message to his wife, telling her she could now change the sheets. There would be a party tonight in Los Alamos. His old friend Isidor Rabi watched him as he strode across the camp. Something in Oppenheimer’s bearing chilled his flesh. “I’ll never forget the way he walked,” he said later. “It was like High Noon—I think it’s the best I could describe it—this kind of strut. He’d done it.” Gone was all the fragile self-doubt, replaced by something quite different: the intoxicating certainties of power.

His test director, Kenneth Bainbridge, came up to him, numb and exhausted. He held out his hand. “Oppie,” he said, “now we are all sons of bitches.”

IN POTSDAM, it was 3:30 in the afternoon. With Stalin not expected until tomorrow, Truman decided to do a little sightseeing. Along with Jimmy Byrnes, his secretary of state, and Admiral Leahy, the White House chief of staff, he climbed into the backseat of an open Chrysler convertible and drove off to see the ruins of Berlin.

On the way, he stopped to review the U.S. Second Armored Division. The troops lined the road toward Berlin. Their nickname was “Hell on Wheels,” and they were the biggest armored division in the world. It took the president’s convoy twenty-two minutes to ride from one end to the other. Here was American power at its mightiest and most concrete. “We drove slowly down a mile and a half of good soldiers and some millions of dollars worth of equipment,” he wrote, “which had amply paid its way to Berlin.” The relationship between cost and effect, between cash and power, was one that Truman would not be slow to recognize again.

The presidential party then drove into Berlin. The spectacle that greeted them was awesome and terrible. For more than five years Allied bombs had rained down on the city. In the last weeks of the war, the Russians had poured a never-ending rain of shells and rockets directly into its heart. Four million people had once lived here, and now there was barely a house or building intact. The destruction was literally everywhere. Every wall was savaged with shellfire, every window a gaping hole, every street a smashed litter of craters and rubble and gnarled metal. Nothing grew or flourished except weeds and disease. Truman’s Chrysler slowly edged through a world from which all color had been drained, and with it all hope.

But it was the survivors who affected the president most. From the windows of his car, he gazed at the never-ending processions of broken, dislocated people, refugees in their own city. “We saw old men, old women, young women, children from tots to teens,” he wrote in his diary, “carrying packs, pushing carts, pulling carts … and carrying what they could of their belongings to nowhere in particular.” The spectacle haunted him. This, he said, is what happens when one man overreaches himself. Berlin’s ruin was Hitler’s folly.

The president’s car slowly drove out of the battered city, back to the sunny suburban tranquillity of Babelsberg. The jagged, broken skyline with its hopeless millions receded behind. But the experience hung like a lead weight on Truman’s mind. His diary that night is untypically philosophical. “I hope for some sort of peace,” he wrote. “But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll be a reckoning—who knows?”

He would not have to wait long to find out.

THE FIRST person to enter Ground Zero was a scientist called Herbert Anderson, and he went in a lead-lined Sherman tank weighing twelve tons and carrying its own oxygen supply. It was now 7 A.M., just one and a half hours after the test. As the tank trundled slowly over the desert toward the place where the tower had once stood, the Geiger counters on board went off scale. The tank ground to a halt. Through a heavily shielded periscope, Herbert Anderson stared at the world outside.

A strange, greenish substance glittered in the morning sun on every side. It was smooth and it looked like glass and it stretched out from Ground Zero to a radius of perhaps 400 yards. The sagebrush had entirely vanished. Anderson had never seen anything like it before. He radioed back to base that the area had turned “all green.” In fact it was a bizarre chemical mutation. The thousands of tons of sand sucked up into the fireball had fused into glass before being hurled back on the ground. This alien greenish substance was the result. It surrounded Anderson’s tank like a petrified green sea. Later it was given a name: Trinitite. Like the fireball from which it was created, it was lethally radioactive.

Slowly Anderson panned the periscope across the site. The one hundred-foot steel tower where Don Hornig had spent the night had completely disappeared. The only trace of its existence was its massive concrete stumps, and these had been slammed seven feet into the earth. Half a mile away, another thirty-two-ton, six-story steel tower lay tossed like a child’s plaything on the ground, a smashed and twisted wreck of mangled girders. An enormous crater now surrounded Ground Zero, 1,200 feet in diameter and 25 feet deep. The force of the bomb’s blast had literally hammered the earth open.

Within a mile of Zero every living thing was dead. Every animal, every insect, every tree, every blade of grass. Nothing had survived. With an irony so perfect it seemed almost deliberate, a huge number of the instruments set up to measure the blast had also been destroyed by it. Across the desert they lay smashed and scorched and bent. Most of the cameras that had not been shielded by lead were destroyed. Much of the film had been blackened and fogged by the extreme radiation. And the radiation was everywhere.

Even in Anderson’s lead-lined tank, the levels were beginning to rise. He did not stick around too long. At the edge of the crater, he quickly fired off a tethered rocket into the ground, scooping up samples of soil and Trinitite with a specially designed claw. Then he signaled the driver to return to base camp. Clumsily, the tank turned away from the crater, lumbering across the slippery green surface of bomb-blasted glass.

At 7:30 that evening, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was in his villa in Babelsberg when he received a cable from Washington. It came from George Harrison, his assistant at the Pentagon.

TOP SECRET Number WAR 32887 To Humelsine for Colonel Kyle’s EYES ONLY from Harrison for Stimson.

Operated on this morning. Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem satisfactory and already exceed expectations. Local press release necessary as interest extends great distance. Dr. Groves pleased. He returns tomorrow. I will keep you posted.

Stimson immediately replied:

From: TERMINAL To: War Department To Secretary General Staff for Mr. George L. Harrison’s EYES ONLY. From Stimson. TOP SECRET

I send my warmest congratulations to the Doctor and the consultant.

Stimson left his villa and crossed over to the Little White House. He found Truman sitting in his drawing room with Jimmy Byrnes swatting mosquitoes. It was a warm summer’s evening, and the windows were open to the lake and the gardens. The president scanned Harrison’s cable. “I feel fine,” he said, “it’s taken a great load off my mind.” Then he told an old Kansas joke about a girl who said she would drown herself if she discovered she was pregnant. It is not recorded if any of his audience laughed.

LATER THAT EVENING, Stimson returned to his villa. Somewhere still in his office were the “Magic” intercepts he had read earlier that day. They were all there: the Japanese ambassador’s hard-headed realism, the Japanese foreign minister’s desperate pleas for an honorable surrender. In those carefully translated, typewritten pages lay exposed the latest chapter in Japan’s stumbling steps toward some kind of peaceful solution. But now there was a new dimension. Now there was the bomb: no longer a putative threat, but a physical, achieved, brutal actuality.

Perhaps, thought Stimson, there was still a bridge across which the president and the Japanese could meet. Perhaps Truman could yet be persuaded to let the Japanese keep their emperor, to give them the honorable surrender their foreign minister craved. The more moderate, unfanatical parties in Japan might yet be encouraged to deliver a peace before this man-made Frankenstein destroyed them all.

Stimson prepared for bed. The old, tired, aristocratic statesman who had nursed the bomb through the long wilderness years would try once more to prevent it from being actually used. As the secretary of war, he knew better than anybody just how little time was left.

THE USS Indianapolis set sail at exactly eight o’clock in the morning, Pacific War Time, just three and a half hours after Trinity blew its great glass hole in the ground. The crew were at morning colors as the heavy cruiser eased under the Golden Gate Bridge thirty-six minutes later.

In happier times, she had carried President Roosevelt on his tour of Latin America. He had famously dined off fresh venison in her mess and watched Laurel and Hardy movies in her cinema. Now she carried a crate and a bucket and two fake artillery officers who sat in their cabin day and night with a padlock and a key and a Geiger counter.

On the bridge, Captain McVay rang for full speed. The ship’s 107,000-horsepower engines turned her four massive screws faster and faster in the water. A boiling white wake of foam marked her path as she cut through the waves, unescorted and alone, out into the open ocean.

The dress rehearsal was over.

ACT II DECISION JULY 18–28, 1945

The responsibility taken by Mr. Truman was essentially, I think, the responsibility taken by a surgeon who comes in after the whole patient has been opened up and the appendix is exposed and half cut off and he says, “Yes, I think he ought to have out the appendix—that’s my decision.”

GENERAL LESLIE GROVES

The atomic bomb was no “great decision.” … Not any decision you had to worry about.

PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN