Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  Its cousin, the plutonium bomb, was regarded as less of a sure bet. Its heart was a sphere of plutonium about the size of a softball encased in a cradle of high explosives designed to ignite at the same instant, their force amplified with lenses, pushing the plutonium into a small ball to cause a chain reaction. But if the explosives failed to fire at exactly the same instant—a moment measured in nanoseconds—the plutonium would be ejected and the bomb would fizzle. Its key similarity with the uranium bomb was that it also hinged on a simple act: The element had to be rammed into itself to achieve critical mass.

  A test weapon code-named “Trinity” was taken out to a remote spot in the New Mexico desert to the west of the Oscura Mountains, a plain of dun-colored malpais called Jornada de Muerto, or “Journey of Death.” At 5:29 in the morning on July 16, 1945, the plutonium device was set off, and it unleashed the equivalent of five thousand truckloads of dynamite within the space of a quarter second.

  Otto Frisch was watching from twenty-five miles away.

  By that time the first trace of dawn was in the sky. I got out of the car and listened to the countdown 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 looked 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 colorless 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 that 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 bit like a strawberry. . . . The bang came minutes later, quite loud though I had plugged my ears, and followed by a long rumble like heavy traffic very far away. I can still hear it.

  The flash disintegrated the tower on which Trinity had been perched and turned the surrounding desert caliche into a lake of greenish glass nearly five thousand feet across. The physicist I. I. Rabi said, “There was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up in the air in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. . . . A new thing had been born; a new control; a new understanding of man, which man had acquired over nature.” Rabi added, “It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way into you.” A representative of the Monsanto chemical company thought it looked like “a giant brain, the convolutions of which were constantly changing.”

  Hardly a man given to poetry, Leslie Groves nevertheless reported to the secretary of war a feeling of “profound awe” among nearly all those who saw it. “I no longer consider the Pentagon a safe shelter from such a blast,” he noted in his July 18, 1945, memo.

  This cold-blooded structural assessment, with a note of prolicide, may have been the most eloquent thing the general was capable of summoning: the knowledge that the building whose construction he supervised for sixteen months could be leveled in one second by this Thing he had played a leading role in unleashing. It was, perhaps, his own way of echoing the fragment that famously occurred to J. Robert Oppenheimer, a line from the Hindu sacred text Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” At his side, the Harvard physicist Kenneth Bainbridge put it another way: “Now we are all sons of bitches.” The man who had discovered the neutron, James Chadwick, was silent as he watched the mushroom cloud rise. Somebody clapped him on the back and he flinched, making a choked sound of surprise, and was silent again.

  The uranium bomb was shipped to an American air base on the island of Tinian and loaded into the bay of the B-29 Enola Gay5 on the evening of August 5, 1945. An airman thought it looked like “an elongated trash can with wings.” Only three members of the nine-man crew had been told exactly what it was that they were scheduled to drop over Hiroshima at 8:15 the following morning.

  In New York City that evening, the phone rang in Edgar Sengier’s room at the Ambassador Hotel. He heard a male voice instruct him to turn on the radio and keep listening. The caller then hung up without identifying himself.

  “I daresay they thought I had a right to know what was announced,” Sengier said later.

  Hiroshima had been founded on the delta of the Ota River in 1589 during the samurai era and had grown to be an industrial city of about four hundred thousand people. It housed the headquarters of the Japanese Second Army. Until August 6, however, it had been spared the regular bombing suffered by other Japanese cities, so that the atomic bomb’s full destructive potential would be on display. The epicenter was the Aioi Bridge in the middle of downtown, a place the pilot of the Enola Gay called the most perfect target he had ever seen.

  The white flash ripped through the heart of town, spreading a nimbus of heat that reached five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Birds exploded in flight. A squad of soldiers gazing up at the airplane felt their eyeballs melt and roll down their cheeks. People closest to the bridge were instantly reduced to lumps of ash. Farther out, people felt their skin burning and tearing and buildings disintegrated and streets boiled in their own tar. Children watched helplessly as their parents died underneath rubble.

  “A woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of her mouth was wandering around the area of Shinsho-machi in the heavy black rain,” reported one man. A junior college student said, “At the base of a bridge, inside a big cistern that had been dug out there, was a mother weeping and holding above her head a naked baby that was burned bright red all over its body, and another mother was crying and sobbing as she gave her burned breast to her baby.”

  A school for girls near the blast zone was vaporized, along with more than six hundred young students. Years later a memorial was erected on the site: a concrete female angel crowned with a wreath and holding a box with the legend e = mC2.

  In Washington, President Harry S. Truman released a prepared statement.

  “The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East,” he said. “Few know what they have been producing. They see great quantities of material going in and they see nothing coming out of these plants, for the physical size of the explosive charge is exceedingly small. We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history. We won.”

  He promised “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth” if the Japanese did not surrender immediately.

  Less than three days later, the plutonium bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, known as the San Francisco of Japan because of the beauty of its architecture and hilly seaside charm. It also had the largest population of Christian converts anywhere in the nation. Clouds had obscured the view of the city, and the plane had flown above it in circles, waiting for a gap to open. The bomb had to be dropped at the last minute, above a suburban Roman Catholic cathedral several miles from the original downtown target, a decision that accidentally saved the lives of thousands. The explosion was partly smothered by the hills, but it was still powerful enough to burn more than forty thousand people to death in the space of a few seconds. The amount of material inside the bomb that actually flashed into energy was but one gram—about one-third of the weight of a Lincoln penny.

  An observer in the plane gazed at the mushroom cloud as the crew turned toward home.

  “The boiling pillar of many colors could also be seen at that distance, a great mountain of jumbled rainbows in travail,” he said. “Much living substance had gone into those rainbows.”

  4

  APOCALYPSE

  The world will end in fire. This belief can be found inside the official doctrine of a remarkable number of the world’s religions.

  In the twelfth century b.C., the prophet Zoroaster taught that a great confrontation between armies of good and evil w
ould cause the mountains to collapse and turn into rivers of burning lava. The Aboriginals of Australia believe that mountains and plains are the frozen incarnations of the Creators, who will, if provoked, rise up and destroy all of existence with fire or flood. The Hopi of northern Arizona await the coming of a Fourth Age, and various prophecies describe a “gourd of ashes” thrown from heaven that will burn the land and boil the seas after young people reject the wisdom of their ancestors. Even the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, with its cyclical view of history, describes a “night of Brahman” when the universe will burst into fire before it is completely remade.

  Norse mythology is unusually detailed: Three winters come with no summer in between them. The stars will vanish, the land will shake, men will kill their brothers, and the gods will make war with one another, culminating in a final orgy of violence. The Norse divinities have advance knowledge of their fate, called in German the Götterdämmerung, or “twilight of the gods,” right down to who will kill whom with the slash of a sword, but they can do nothing to prevent it from happening.

  A body of ancient Jewish writings makes reference to the acharit hayamim, or “the end of days.” The most famous document was written shortly after the Jews were taken captive by the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar II in 606 b.C. A court adviser named Daniel dreamed of four beasts arising from the sea, the last with ten horns and iron teeth that “crushed and devoured its victims” before God appeared over a river of fire to initiate a kingdom with no end.

  Some of Daniel’s readers took this to mean that a massive battle would soon take place, perhaps near a hilltop outside the northern crossroads town of Megiddo. This was the spot where the beloved King Josiah was killed in battle just before the Babylonians drove the Israelites from their homes. The Har Megiddo (also called “Mount Megiddo” or “Armageddon”) was the traditional Levantine geography of good’s final triumph over evil and, with it, the purifying fire and end of history.

  The Christian mystic John of Patmos had a dream about the end of the world in the first century A.d. He wrote an unforgettable account of a pale horse with Death as a rider; hail, fire, and a third of the earth burned up. “The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as late figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind,” he wrote. “The sky receded like a scroll, rolling up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.” The rain of fire and ruin must happen before the battle at Megiddo and the return of Jesus Christ to rule over all eternity. John’s vision became known as the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible. It is the most detailed account of the Christian apocalypse—in Greek, apokalypsis, which means to “uncover” or “disclose” the ultimate reality lurking behind the curtains of everyday color and sound.

  Anticipation of the end did not dull with time. Saint Augustine found himself cajoling people in the third century to “relax your fingers and give them a rest” because too many were trying to calculate the last day. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory observed, “The world grows old and hoary and hastens to its approaching end.” Viking attacks and comet appearances in the British Isles led many there to expect Christ’s return in the year 1000; England’s first land registry was called the Domesday Boke—that is, Doomsday Book—in anticipation of the final hour. The bubonic plagues of later centuries were seen as bowls of heavenly wrath poured out onto a wicked race, to be followed, mercifully, by the Last Judgment. The European exploration of the New World in the fifteenth century was accomplished in the light of a global sunset: Christopher Columbus noted that he sought to convert the natives of the West Indies to Christianity in a particular hurry because the world would soon be burning.

  The end of time is not just a concept for the religious. The philosopher Georg Hegel taught that a dialectical progression of political forces would result in a new order; many of his admirers assumed that a final plateau would arrive within their lifetimes. Karl Marx foresaw an “end to history” when capital and labor joined in an egalitarian superstate; his followers tried to quicken that day through violent revolution. In the social upheaval of 1960s California, Joan Didion could write, “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathanael West perceived that in The Day of the Locust,6 and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots, what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.”

  Is this a belief native to all of humanity? Is there a corner of the mind that is biologically predisposed to believe in an imminent end to the earth? The staggering number of religions and philosophies that forecast a burning before a final age of light makes it a question worth examining.

  Carl Jung thought there was something archetypical about a global burning. “The four sinister horsemen, the threatening tumult of trumpets and the burning vials of wrath are still waiting,” he wrote. Before him, Sigmund Freud viewed belief in Armageddon to be a common sign of schizophrenia. He also identified a dark urge he called destrudo, the opposite of libido. This is the destructive ecstasy in man, the flip side of his life-giving nature, the motor of warfare and slaughter. The images of the world going up in flames may be rooted in an individual’s subconscious desire to be the one holding the torch. Or perhaps a belief in apocalypse is one of the mind’s ways of subsuming the terrible foreknowledge of one’s own death—apocalypse being a drama played out on a world stage that reflects the more mundane trauma of the individual self passing away. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, the philosopher William James wrote of faith as an essentially organic function; if that is true, then there may be no more profound organic stimulus to contemplate than death, which represents the end of existence as we understand it: the “burning of the earth” as a hazy and displaced amplification of the death pangs of the body before the final tide of white. Armageddon could turn out to be the most intimate of events—a Megiddo of the cortex.

  But whether it stems from a genuine divine source or a neurological twinge (or both), the suspicion that the earth is ticking away its final hours has been salted throughout mythologies, religions, and cultures for many thousands of years. The suspicion of it exists on a grand collective scale in the same way that the narrator of Albert Camus’s existential novel The Stranger perceives his own doom before his execution. “Throughout the whole of the absurd life I’ve lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future. . . .”

  Historians call this idea endism and note that it tends to show up in fullest strength during times of crisis. And for those who witnessed the emergence of uranium bombs in 1945, the vocabulary of apocalypse came quite naturally.

  The Harvard physicist George B. Kistiakowsky, invited to watch the Trinity explosion, called it “the nearest thing to Doomsday that one could possibly imagine. I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond—the last man will see what we have just seen.” Normally sober newspapers reached for similar language. In the days immediately following the destruction of Hiroshima, the Washington Post called the uranium bomb a “contract with the devil” and concluded, “It will be seen that the life expectancy of our strange and perverse human race has dwindled immeasurably in the course of two brief weeks.” The Philadelphia Inquirer termed it a “new beast of the apocalypse.”

  Even President Truman, who was famously coolheaded about the decision to use the weapon on Japan, wondered in his diary if the act he would soon authorize was “the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous ark.”

  Hiroshima has been called the exclamation point of the twentieth century, but it went much deeper than that. It threatened something embedded in the consciousness of the species: the imperative of collective survival. In the first week of August 1945, for the very first time in history, that sliver of the mind that watches for the end of the world was handed a scientific reason to believ
e the present generation may actually have been the one fated to experience the last burning, and that all the cities and monuments and music and literature and progeny and every eon-surviving achievement and legacy of man could be wiped away from the surface of the planet as a breeze wipes away pollution, leaving behind only a dead cinder, a tombstone to turn mindlessly around the sun. Forty thousand years of civilization destroyed in twelve hours.

  For the religious and secular alike, uranium had become the mineral of apocalypse.

  America went through a collective pause in the first days after Hiroshima, a period of quietude not unlike that after September 11, 2001, when the nation stopped cold for a week. Apprehension and confusion were widespread—a remarkable mood for a nation on the verge of winning a major war.

  A correspondent for the New York Sun reported a “sense of oppression” in Washington as people talked about the new weapon. “For two days it has been an unusual thing to see a smile among the throngs that crowd the street.” The sepulchral mood was noticed, too, by Edward R. Murrow of CBS News. “Seldom if ever has a war ended with such a sense of uncertainty and fear,” he said, “with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.” The president of Haverford College, Felix Morley, wrote, “Instead of the anticipated wave of nationalistic enthusiasm, the general reaction was one of unconcealed horror.”