Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
The Military Books United States Science

What Eyewitnesses Remembered About the World's First Atomic Bomb Explosion in 1945 (politico.com) 38

Posted by EditorDavid from the big-bang dept.
Historian Garrett M. Graff describes his upcoming book, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. "I assembled an oral history of the Manhattan Project, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II in the Pacific, told through the voices of around 500 participants and witnesses of the events — including luminaries like Albert Einstein and Oppenheimer and political figures like President Harry Truman."

It was 80 years ago this week that physicists and 150 other leaders in the atomic bomb program "gathered in the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, for the world's first test of a nuclear explosion." In an except from his upcoming book, Graff publishes quotes from eyewitness: Brig. Gen. Leslie Groves: I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi when he suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world. He had also said that after all it wouldn't make any difference whether the bomb went off or not because it would still have been a well worthwhile scientific experiment. For if it did fail to go off, we would have proved that an atomic explosion was not possible. Afterward, I realized that his talk had served to smooth down the frayed nerves and ease the tension of the people at the base camp, and I have always thought that this was his conscious purpose. Certainly, he himself showed no signs of tension that I could see...

As the hour approached, we had to postpone the test — first for an hour and then later for 30 minutes more — so that the explosion was actually three- and one-half hours behind the original schedule... Our preparations were simple. Everyone was told to lie face down on the ground, with his feet toward the blast, to close his eyes and to cover his eyes with his hands as the countdown approached zero. As soon as they became aware of the flash they could turn over and sit or stand up, covering their eyes with the smoked glass with which each had been supplied... The quiet grew more intense. I, myself, was on the ground between Bush and Conant...

Edward Teller: We all were lying on the ground, supposedly with our backs turned to the explosion. But I had decided to disobey that instruction and instead looked straight at the bomb. I was wearing the welder's glasses that we had been given so that the light from the bomb would not damage our eyes. But because I wanted to face the explosion, I had decided to add some extra protection. I put on dark glasses under the welder's glasses, rubbed some ointment on my face to prevent sunburn from the radiation, and pulled on thick gloves to press the welding glasses to my face to prevent light from entering at the sides... We all listened anxiously as the broadcast of the final countdown started; but, for whatever reason, the transmission ended at minus five seconds...

Kenneth T. Bainbridge: My personal nightmare was knowing that if the bomb didn't go off or hang-fired, I, as head of the test, would have to go to the tower first and seek to find out what had gone wrong...

Brig. Gen. Thomas F. Farrell: Dr. Oppenheimer held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead.
A few examples of how they remembered the explosion:
  • William L. Laurence: There rose from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one.
  • Kenneth T. Bainbridge: I felt the heat on the back of my neck, disturbingly warm.
  • George B. Kistiakowsky: I am sure that at the end of the world — in the last millisecond of the earth's existence — the last man will see what we have just seen.
  • Brig. Gen. Thomas F. Farrell: Oppenheimer's face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief.
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer: We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried.
  • Norris Bradbury, physicist, Los Alamos Lab: Some people claim to have wondered at the time about the future of mankind. I didn't. We were at war, and the damned thing worked.

What Eyewitnesses Remembered About the World's First Atomic Bomb Explosion in 1945 More | Reply

What Eyewitnesses Remembered About the World's First Atomic Bomb Explosion in 1945

Comments Filter:

  • grandfather was an eyewitness (Score:3)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Saturday July 19, 2025 @04:02PM (#65531652) Journal

    Once years ago at a family gathering, some of us were on the roof seeing if we could spot Mir going overhead.

    While we were waiting, grandfather, who had a draft deferment during WWII due to being in the defense industry, told a story whereby his foreman told the team that something special was about to happen. They all went to the roof and he directed them to look east. Grandfather said that about a half hour later there was a brilliant flash on the horizon. Nothing was said about what it was, but later he pieced together that it must have been the first test in New Mexico.

    No idea if this is true, but it's a neat story.

    • Unlikely that random foreman knew about the highly classified test.

      • I would take any stories people tell after the fact about an event like that with a grain of salt. They tell us how people want to be perceived. Teller was a "tough guy", Oppenheimer a thoughtful intellectual etc. And everyone wants what they remember to be profound in some way. No one says, "I had to go the bathroom and the delay was killing me. So mostly I was just relieved it was over so I could go relieve myself."
      • A classified test that potentially hundreds of thousands of people were involved with. Of which just one single person had to tell his brother/cousin/drinking buddy/whatever, "at around this time, keep an eye out to the east".

  • oppenheimer's reaction (Score:4, Informative)

    by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposer.alum@mit@edu> on Saturday July 19, 2025 @05:01PM (#65531722) Homepage
    Oppenheimer is is said to have quoted from the Bhagavad Gita (11:32): "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.
    • Darn /. didnt reproduce the sanskrit. Here's a link: https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita... [holy-bhagavad-gita.org]

      • There's an interesting debate about the Bhagavad Gita in that some of the stories in there apparently describe effects that are in line with a nuclear or even thermo-nuclear explosion and that therefore Oppenheimer would have "known" about the bomb.

        I guess after Otto Hahn was able to split Uranium atoms, physicists started to realize the orders of magnitude of power that this could deliver.

        The 1930s were wild. In a sense, we're approaching the same social, political and technological climate again. God kno

    • I talked to about this quote have no idea what Dr. Oppenheimer was speaking about.

      • I talked to about this quote have no idea what Dr. Oppenheimer was speaking about.

        I suspect that is because of a selection bias. I've met people from India also and they were not like what demographic studies would imply as "average". If they left India for work or an education in some English speaking nation like UK, Australia, or USA then that puts them in the narrow portion of the demography of English speaking as only 10% of the Indian population speak English as a first, second, or third language. Speaking English likely makes them not just educated, male, young, and urban, but a

        • Quite true, though 90% wouldn't be Christians but we would still be quite ignorant of most Hindu religious texts !

          Though I understand the specific quote - "destroyer of worlds", it's too deep or philosophical unless you have read (and understood) the Gita (one of the many religious / philosophical books). It's like 'do no evil' or 'connecting people'.

          Hinduism is not as much a religion as all the others, more philosophy of life for like atheists who believe in 'some' power and are cool with everyone's belief

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by notjim ( 879031 )
      He didn't say it at the time; he said later, much later, that he thought it. The better quote is from Bainbridge: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

  • A creepy story (Score:3)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Saturday July 19, 2025 @07:24PM (#65531844)

    This story prompted a memory of reading about men - with their eyes closed and facing away from a nuclear blast - seeing x-ray type images of their own hands. I did a quick search and found this: [dailymail.co.uk]

    "We put our hands over our eyes and they counted down over the tannoy. There was a sharp flash, and I could see the bones in my hands like an X-ray. Then the sound and the wind, and they told us to turn and face it."

    In similar reports, I've read of men seeing the spines of those in front of them, through closed eyes and with hands in front of their faces.

    • This story prompted a memory of reading about men - with their eyes closed and facing away from a nuclear blast - seeing x-ray type images of their own hands. I did a quick search and found this: [dailymail.co.uk]

      The Daily Mail part should have been your first warning*. Imagine yourself in that position: facing away from the blast with hands covering your eyes. Now, where is the light passing through your hands into your eyes coming from?

      In similar reports, I've read of men seeing the spines of those in front of them, through closed eyes and with hands in front of their faces.

      You can also find reports of soldiers hearing the fabled "Garand ping" during firefights or the sound of bullets whizzing by their ears. Human memory is notoriously unreliable even without our propensity for telling tall tales.

      * I'll concede that Mail Online is slightly closer to ac

  • Are by Don A. Farrell: "Tinian and the Bomb" (2018) and "Atomic Bomb Island" (2021). Farrell lives on Tinian and spent years doing research on the Manhattan Project.

  • Ehem, Louis Slotin Was There : ) (Score:3)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Saturday July 19, 2025 @09:03PM (#65531956) Homepage
    I am pretty sure Louis Slotin was there. Then he ticked the Dragon's tail one time too many.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Here you can find some accounts of several real eyewitnesses: https://atomicarchive.com/reso... [atomicarchive.com]

  • I knew Philip Morrison, who was there (Score:3)

    by sk999 ( 846068 ) on Saturday July 19, 2025 @10:39PM (#65532044)

    This was decades later, and while his spoke only sparingly of his times working on the Manhatten project, here are his recollections of what he saw:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

  • Otto Frisch. (Score:3)

    by alanw ( 1822 ) <alan@wylie.me.uk> on Sunday July 20, 2025 @03:02AM (#65532270) Homepage

    The first company I worked for: Laser-Scan in Cambridge, UK, was founded by Otto Frisch [wikipedia.org]

    This from his Autobiography What Little I Remember
    Finally the announcement came that the count-down was beginning: now it would be only minutes before the explosion took place. By that time the very first trace of dawn was in the sky. I got out of the car and listened to the count-down, and when the last minute arrived I looked for my dark goggles but couldn't find them. So I sat on the ground in case the explosion blew me over, plugged my ears with my fingers, and looking in the direction away from the explosion as I listened to the end of the count . . . five, four, three, two, one...

    And then, without a sound, the sun was shining; or so it looked. The sand hills at the edge of the desert were shimmering in a very bright light, almost colourless and shapeless. The light did not seem to change for a couple of seconds and then began to dim. I turned around, but that object on the horizon which looked like a small sun was still too bright to look at. I kept blinking and trying to take looks, and after another ten seconds or so it had grown and dimmed into something more like a huge oil fire, with a structure that made it look a but like a strawberry. It was slowly rising into the sky from the ground, with which it remained connected by a lengthening grey stem of swirling dust; incongruously, I thought like a red-hot elephant balanced on its trunk. Then, as the cloud of gas cooled and became less red, one could see a blue glow surrounding it, a glow of ionized air; a huge replica of what Harry Daghlian had seen when his assembly went critical and had signalled his death sentence. The object, now clearly what has become so well known as the mushroom cloud, ceased to rise but a second mushroom started to grow out from its top; the inner layers of gas were kept hot by their radioactivity and, being hotter than the rest, broke through from the top and rose to even greater height. It was an awesome spectacle; anyone who has ever seen an atomic explosion will never forget it. And all in complete silence; the bang came minutes later, quite loud though I had plugged my ears, and followed by a low rumble like heavy traffic very far away. I can still hear it.

  • I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi when he suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.

    Seems a dumb bet, as if it had blown up the entire state or the world, nobody would be alive to pay up. Perhaps Fermi was just trolling.

    By the way, we have similar decision coming up as to whether to bring Mars samples back to Earth. There's a non-zero chance they will have

  • Brig. Gen. Leslie Groves:

    For if it did fail to go off, we would have proved that an atomic explosion was not possible.

    He may have believed that, but he misunderstood the purpose of the test. The test was not a test to see if an atomic explosion was possible. It is a test to see if the much more complicated implosion detonation device would work. The physicists were already so certain that the simple uranium gun mechanism used in the Hiroshima bomb would work that they didn't believe it necessary to test.

Slashdot Top Deals

Thufir's a Harkonnen now.

Close