Oppenheimer taught not only at Berkeley but also at the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena. As soon as he ended a course of lectures at the
university most of his students would follow him, for the ensuing term, to this
second seat of learning near Los Angeles. Despite his youth, 'Oppie', as they
called him, had come to be looked upon as a master and model by the rising
generation of physicists in America, just as the great men of atomic research in
Europe had been regarded by himself only a few years before. The veneration
felt by the students for their hero was so great that consciously or unconsciously
they imitated many of his personal peculiarities. They held their heads a little on
one side just as he did. They coughed Slightly and paused significantly between
successive sentences. They held their hands in front of their lips when they
spoke. Their ways of expressing themselves were often difficult to understand.
They were fond of making obscure comparisons which Sounded most pregnant
and sometimes actually were so. Oppenheimer, himself a confirmed smoker, had
the habit of clicking open his lighter and jumping up whenever anyone took out
a cigarette or pipe. His students could be recognized from afar in the campus
cafeterias Of Berkeley and Pasadena by their custom of darting about from time
to time, like marionettes on invisible strings, with tiny flames between their
fingers.
II
'Many physicists only have high-voltage current in their veins,' said someone
who had known him a long time. ‘But Sam has blood. He knows that the world
contains other interesting things besides equations and cyclotrons.' It was typical
of Goudsmit that he gave the following advice to a young nuclear physicist who
wanted to go to an atom-bomb test in Nevada. 'If you want to see a show, why
don't you buy a ticket to one of the current Broadway musicals? That might help
you more with your work than going west. Pauli won the Nobel prize by going
to the theatre, you know. He was watching a revue in Copenhagen when the
exclusion principle came to him.'
III
As early as the spring of 1945 a study group within the Manhattan Project was
given the task of selecting a target for the first employment of the bomb. The
group comprised mathematicians, theoretical physicists, specialists on the effects
of explosions and meteorological experts. This team, mainly composed of
scientists, including Robert Oppenheimer, came to the conclusion, according to a
report published later in a limited edition by the Manhattan Engineer District,
that targets for this peculiar type of bomb must satisfy the following conditions:
(a) Since the atomic bomb is expected to produce its greatest amount of
damage by primary blast effect and next greatest by fires, the targets should
contain a large percentage of closely built frame buildings and other construction
that would be most susceptible to damage by blast and fire;
(b) the maximum blast effect of the bomb is calculated to extend over an area
of approximately one mile in radius. Therefore the selected targets should
contain a densely built-up area of at least this size;
(c) the targets selected should possess high military and strategic value; (d) the
first target should if possible be one that has escaped earlier bombardments, so
that the effect of a single atomic bomb can be ascertained.
It was further resolved that four Japanese cities should be deliberately spared
bombardment by the American formations which by 1945 could reconnoitre any
target they pleased in Japan with practically no resistance. This deceptive period
of grace was granted these four cities so they could be doomed to a ruin all the
more dreadful by the new bomb.
IV
On 21 May 1946, not quite a year later, Slotin was carrying out an experiment,
similar to those he had so often successfully performed in the past. It was
connected with the preparation of the second atom-bomb test, to be performed in
the waters of the South Sea atoll of Bikini. Suddenly his screwdriver slipped. The
hemispheres came too close together and the material became critical. The whole
room was instantly filled with a dazzling, bluish glare. Slotin, instead of ducking
and thereby possibly saving himself, tore the two hemispheres apart with his
hands and thus interrupted the chain reaction. By this action he saved the lives of
the seven other persons in the room. He had realized at once that he himself
would be bound to succumb to the effects of the excessive radiation dose which
he had absorbed. But he did not lose his self-control for a moment. He told his
colleagues to go and stand exactly where they had been at the instant of the
disaster. He then drew on the blackboard, with his own hand, an accurate sketch
of their relative positions, so that the doctors could ascertain the degree of
radiation to which each of those present had been exposed.
V
Strange to say, a terrible fate was also in store for the complement of the
cruiser Indianapolis, which took to Tinian the greater part of the explosive heart of
the first atom bomb destined for use against Japan. Only three men aboard the
vesse2 the fastest in the American fleet, had any idea what she was carrying. The
rest simply supposed that there must be something very important in the big
wooden case which had been hoisted aboard, with every precaution, on the
morning of 16 July shortly before the ship put to sea. During the voyage from
San Francisco to Tinian very special security measures were taken for defence
against hostile submarines. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief when the
Indianapolis, after unloading her secret cargo at Tinian, stood for the offing. But
before the cruiser had reached her second port of call she was struck, at five
minutes past midnight on 30 July, by a torpedo. Owing to a series of unfortunate
circumstances news of the sinking did not reach naval headquarters for another
four days. Signals from another ship were wrongly taken to be routine reports
from the Indianapolis of her position and owing to one more misunderstanding
she was not reported as overdue at Leyte harbour. Therefore, salvage units
arrived too late at the scene of the disaster, and of the ship's 1,196 men only 316
were rescued. Some days before the first test of the bomb it was an open secret in
Alamogordo, even among the wives and children of the Los Alamos scientists,
that some particularly important and exciting event was in preparation. The test
was referred to under the code name 'Trinity'. No clear explanation has hitherto
been forthcoming as to why this blasphemous expression was employed, above
all in such a connexion. One probability is that it was taken from the name of a
turquoise mine near Los Alamos, which had been laid under a curse and
therefore abandoned by the superstitious Indians. Another guess supposes that it
was chosen because at that time the first three atom bombs were approaching
completion, and that the code name was derived simply and solely from the
existence of that hellish trinity.
VI
During the ensuing period of waiting, which seemed an eternity, hardly a
word was spoken. Everyone was giving free play to his thoughts. But so far as
those who have been asked can remember, these thoughts were not apocalyptic.
Most of the people concerned, it appears, were trying to work out how long it
would be before they could shift their uncomfortable position and obtain some
kind of view of the spectacle awaited. Fermi, experimental- minded as ever, was
holding scraps of paper, with which he meant to gauge the air pressure and
thereby estimate the strength of the explosion the moment it occurred. Frisch was
intent on memorizing the phenomenon as precisely as possible, without allowing
either excitement or preconceived notions to interfere with his faculties of
perception. Groves was wondering for the hundredth time whether he had taken
every possible step to ensure rapid evacuation in the case of a disaster.
Oppenheimer oscillated between fears that the experiment would fail and fears
that it would succeed.
VII
Even so cool and matter-of-fact a person as Enrico Fermi received a profound
shock, in spite of the retort he had made to all the objections of his colleagues to
the bomb during the discussions of the past few weeks. He had always said:
'Don't bother me with your conscientious scruples! After all, the thing's superb
physics!' Never before had he allowed anyone else to drive his car. But on this
occasion he confessed that he did not feel capable of sitting at the wheel and
asked a friend to take it for him on the road back to Los Alamos. He told his wife,
the morning after his return, that it had seemed to him as if the car were jumping
from curve to curve, skipping the straight stretches in between.
VIII
Nishina started next day, for the second time, on his flight to Hiroshima, still
hoping that he might after all have been mistaken. In addition to the sorrow he
felt as a patriot he was also tormented by the fear that if a scientific superweapon of this kind had really been constructed and used, the scientists of the
West, his friends over so many years, in the eyes of the Japanese people would
now be inhuman monsters. When on the afternoon of 8 August his aircraft came
within sight of the huge, smoking heap of ruins that had once been a flourishing
city, all his fears were confirmed. Later he told the American officers who cross examined him: 'As I surveyed the damage from the air, I decided at a glance that
nothing but an atomic bomb could have created such devastation.
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