Albuquerque Journal du lieu suivant : Albuquerque, New Mexico • 152

CST AVAILIDLE COPY Sunday, September 19, 1999 A NEW WEAPON Albuquerque Journal C9 "The whole filter seemed to light up as bright as the sun. I was temporarily blinded. I looked to the side. The Oscura mountains were as bright as day. I saw this tremendous ball of fire, and it was rising.

I was just spellbound! I followed it as it rose. Tlienit dawned on me. I'm the photographer! I've gotta get that ball of fire." "Oppenheimer knew it already in some way. We all knew it in some way, and we had therefore this idealistic side to the contract with the devil, if that's what it was, that it would be necessary to develop the weapon to have it known to the whole world, in order that the world could protect itself." BERLYN BRIXNER, AT NORTH 10,000 DAVID HAWKINS- Atomic Age Dawned at Trim ty Site from PAGE C8 Donald Hornig, who would become President Johnson's science adviser 18 years later, took his place near McKibben at on oKrtrt curitVi WnrnifT'c 4rH IX' 3 tn ctnn everything if the detonation circuit faltered, in order to save the plutonium. Kistiakowsky, who would- become President Eisenhower's science adviser, was in and out of the crowded room.

An 18-year-old soldier named Val Fitch was attending British scientist Ernest Titterton at a set of vacuum tubes that would deliver the detonating voltage across six miles of cable. Fitch would win the 1980 Nobel Prize in physics. McKibben recalled these men but said he didnt see Oppenheimer. "I was told that he came in the door and observed me at the controls and went away. Just to see that I ii J1 1.

Vfr THE ASSOCIATED PfiESS WORLD'S LARGEST LAB TEST: Scientists and workmen rig the world's first atomic bomb It up Into a 100-foot tower at the Trinity Site test area. 10 7 Iff! ifr jtf ink and tapped me on the shoulder and says, your box is bouncing around back there and we're scared to touch it' So I went back and corralled it and got a piece of rope and tied it to one of the legs of the cots." At Tinian, Schreiber was met by some of the Los Alamos group that already bad received the rest of Fat Man. At the other side of the island base another group had a crude uranium bomb called Little Boy with a core too heavy for one man to carry. Schreiber put his little box in a fenced, Marine-guarded quonset hut and went to eat. 1 Deadly consequences At 8:15 a.m.

on Aug. 6, 1945, Little Boy destroyed the center of Hushima. It was a relatively crude uranium bomb with a "gun barrel" design that had never been tested, but the theory had been verified at Trinity. On Aug. 9, the plutonium bomb, the twin of the Trinity device, was exploded over Nagasaki.

It's spherical "implosion" design would become the basis of the American nuclear arsenal, and implosion cores would become the triggers for advanced thermonuclear weapons. Historian Richard Rhodes accepted the estimate that the two bombs in Japan together killed 140,000 men, women and children by the end of 1945 and that the total grew to 200,000 from radiation effects by 1950. The firebombing of Tokyo by conventional weapons took an estimated 100,000 lives one night in March 1945. Schreiber, mindful of this, said: "Just file fact you could do the same thing with one airplane and one bomb proved 'the efficiency, but it didn't change the effect very much. But the the saturation bombing of the B-29s was, riot bringing Japan to its knees, and the sljock effect of one airplane being able to wipe but a city, I think, is what finally convinced the Japanese military they had to give up." And as Nobel laureate Bethe put it hj a Journal interview, if the bomb wasnt (lsed, "the Japanese would have had far greater casualties than they did in Hiroshima aijd Nagasaki because the conventioriid firebombing would have continued untilhe Japanese gave up." That was the standard rationale, widely accepted in the Cold War, even by Japanese political leaders.

President Harry Truman stated it first, estimating the atomic bomb saved 1 million American lives, and tq this day, World War II veterans will tell you tne bomb may be the reason they're alive. But radical historians, beginning in the 1960s, disputed the numbers, and a theory advanced by Stanford University Historian Barton Bernstein gained favor It was that Japan would have surrendered anyway and that Truman approved the use of the bomhs in order to intimidate the Soviet Union. In this interpretation, Hiroshima was the first shot fired in the Cold War. Ellen Wilder Bradbury of Santa Fe recalled that weeks after the Japanese surrender, the Wilder family tuned in the only radio they, had, in their car, to hear a wire recording broadcast over KRS. Ellen was about 5 and hadn't understood about Hiroshima.

And now she was hearing, a recording made in the cockpit of "Bocks Car," the B-29 that dropped "Fat on Nagasaki She recalled the now-lost recording clearly. "They said, "We've got an opening in the clouds. OK. We're going And then they counted down to drop it. And they did say, 'Bombs But I had just learned to count, and I was most impressed by the fact that they could count backwards." Looking back Hawkins was among the unpublicized few who declined to go to the Trinity test I didn't want to see it," he said.

He finished his secret history and left Los Alamos, dating the preface Aug. 6, 1946, the first anniversary of Hiroshima. He devoted his life to philosophy and teaching. In the fall of 1995, Hawkins was invited back to Los Alamos to deliver the 25th annual J. Robert Oppenheimer Lecture.

He chose to speak of his experience and theory of how to teach scientific thinking to children. But he opened by reminding the audience in the Los Alamos civic auditorium that thuy had spent their lives working on something "that can never be used." During the interview in Boulder, he bad said Oppenheimer knew the bomb "was inevitable, that "if it wasnt developed, in World War II, it would appear secretly in the arsenals of nations after World WttiB during peacetime. And the greatest bope for coping with this new development was to recognize and to persuade the world recognize that this was not a military weapon. This destructive power was beyond anything that warfare itself as an institution could tolerate," he said. "Oppenheimer knew it already in sqiiie way," he said.

"We all knew it in some wj, and we had therefore this idealistic side tp the contract with the devil if that's what 9 was, that it would be necessary to develop the weapon to have it known to the whole world, in order that the world could protect itself." 'f, ivy ST" "fir it A was saiic. All In position At North 10,000, Berlyn Brixner was in the open on top of the bunker at the controls of a fast movie camera with a blackened viewfinder. "I was one of the few people given permission to look directly at the bomb at zero time" said Brixner, interviewed at the age of 84 in his living 1 room at Los Alamos. Brixner's assignment as chief photographer for Julian Mack was this: shoot movies in 16 mm black-and-white, from every angle and distance and at every speed, of an unknown event beginning with the brightest flash ever produced on Earth. "The theoretical people had calculated a some 10-sun brightness.

So that was easy," said Brixner. "All I had to do was go out and point my camera at the sun and take some pictures. Ten times that was easy to calculate." The theoretical people also knew a little about radiation, which fogs film, and Brixner consequently shielded two of his near-tower cameras behind 12-inch-thick leaded glass. Some of his cameras were so fast they shot 100 feet of film in a second. Some were 20 miles away and ran for 10 minutes.

And now he waited on top of the bunker, gripping the panning-mechanism of his movie camera, which like all the others would be turned on by signals from McKibben's control panel. At Base Camp, the old McDonald ranch house 10 miles south of the tower, the box-seat audience included Gen. Groves and some presidential overseers Carnegie Institute president Vannevar Bush and Harvard president James Bryant Conant. Among the physicists at Base Camp were I.I. Rabi, a New Yorker who would go on to win a Nobel Prize, and Fermi Cameras and goggles Among the 250 lab' workers and 125 soldiers was Jack Aeby, a young "4-P' civilian technician.

Interviewed in 1995 at age 72, the retired Los Alamos health physics worker recalled how his job in the weeks leading to the test was to help the Italian physicist Emilio Segre" set radiation detectors near the tower. Some of the instruments were hung on barrage balloons tethered 800 yards from the tower. They would be vaporized a millisecond after they transmitted their nuclear data. Aeby carried his own personal 35 mm camera, which Segr6 got through security, and now as the countdown started he was planning to take an Anscochrome color transparency picture of the bomb. He had carried a chair out into the darkness and was sitting there with the camera propped on the back and pointed north.

He put on his government-issue welding goggles, not noticing in the dark that there was a crack in one lens. And he listened to the countdown on the Base Camp loudspeakers. At the VTP viewing area called Compania Hill, 20 miles northwest of the tower and about 10 miles southeast of the village of San Antonio, two refugee physicists put on sunburn lotion in the dark. They were Edward Teller of Hungary and Hans Bethe of Germany. Teller would become famous, and Bethe would win the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics.

Teller put on gloves to protect his hands, and sunglasses under his welder's goggles for extra protection. "I expected it to work," Teller said in a 1995 Journal interview. The flash At minus 45 seconds, McKibben cut in an automatic timing drum he and Clarence Turner had made to generate the final 20 relay signals, including the big one. The drum turned once a second, and McKibben says he had attached a chime that struck once each revolution. So there were 44 chimes before Allison bellowed: "Zero!" McKibben waited at his brightly lighted console to throw a last "zero plus 10 seconds" switch that sent up a marker flare for the photography.

The bunker had a small open door on the south, facing away from the shot "Suddenly I realized there was a hell of a lot more light coming in the back door," McKibben says. "A very brilliant light It outdid the light I had on the control panel many times over. I looked out the back door and I could see everything brighter than daylight" Aeby had put his Perfex 44 camera on "bulb" and in the dark before "zero" opened up the shutter, figuring that way he would get a good image of the flash Suddenly the A t. TEAM LEADER: Dr. J.

Robert Oppenheimer led the team that developed the world's first atomic bomb. The test capped a $2 billion effort that was conducted In super secrecy In New Mexico. codeHiamed "The Gadget" to raise German Communist refugee Klaus Fuchs, who would be uncovered as a Russian spy five years later. And outside the Jornada, all of New Mexico had eyes and ears. Teller said many Los Alamos employees, including his secretary Mary Argo, slipped away to Sandia Crest for a direct 100-mile view of the shot that morning.

In Potsdam, just outside the rubble of bombed-out Berlin, President Harry Truman waited for the coded message that the bomb worked, and he would tell Joseph Stalin that America had a secret weapon. Stalin already knew. But the rest of the world didn't have a clue. Not the B-29 pilots who that Friday hit Tokyo, again, with 3,000 conventional bombs. Not the 750,000 American troops who were being made ready for the planned Nov.

1 invasion of Japan. When Teller returned to his Los Alamos office, he said, Mary Argo ran to him, breaking all the secrecy rules, 'Mr. Teller! Mr. Teller! Did you ever see such a thing in your I laughed. And she laughed," he said with joy in his voice.

"Does that tell you something?" At community radio station KRS in Los Alamos, Bob Porton, a GI, was about to rebroadcast the noon news, courtesy of KOB. "Suddenly about 30 or 40 scientists all came in and stood around," he said. "We knew something was up." The lead story, Porton said, was this: "The commanding officer of Alamogordo Air Base announced this morning a huge ammunition dump had blown up, but there were no injuries. "All these scientists jumped up and down and slapped each other on the back," Porton "I was familiar with secrecy. I never asked any questions.

But I knew it was something big." Brixner was already on his way to Hollywood to get his film developed by a secured studio lab. One reel would show his "wake-up" jog of the camera. Aeby developed his color film that night in Los Alamos, using the complex system of a half dozen Ansco chemicals. The first shot of the bomb was overexposed off the scale, but one of the next three became the only good color picture known of the first atomic explosion, Aeby said. The lab said the transparency was lost.

Off to war Ten days after the Trinity shot, at 4 a.m. on July 26, Raemer Schreiber, accompanied by a detachment of MPs, picked up a box the size of a car battery, only lighter, at a vault in Los Alamos. The 10-inch cube was made of magnesium to dissipate heat from a gentle It was protected by four rubber bumpers on each side. "We had three GI sedans, and we drove in the middle one. With the core in the trunk of the sedan, we drove down to Albuquerque," he recalled.

They all flew out of Kirtiand Field in two C-54 cargo planes carrying nothing but "a box of documents and some guards and my little box and me." Nobody talked about the box. Those were the rules. The next day over the Pacific, Schreiber said, "I was sitting up in the copilot's seat The copilot was sacked out And the pilot was reading his dime novel, and we ran into this storm. I says, 'Should I get out of here and let the co-pilot come He says, 'No, I need the instrument "About that time one of guards came up THE ASSOCIATED PRESS First and second thoughts Robert Van Gemert of Albuquerque was at Base Camp in the hours after the shot. "I'm just amazed how those scientists whipped out so many bottles of gin or whatever they could find.

And it was rapidly consumed, I can tell you that," he said in a 1995 interview. GIs said things like: "Buddy, you just saw the end of the war!" "Now we've got the world by the tail!" At South 10,000, Frank Oppenheimer recalled, his brother probably said, "It worked!" Kistiakowsky is supposed to have said to J. Robert Oppenheimer, "You owe me $10," because of a bet they had. Bainbridge is supposed to have told Oppenheimer, "Now we are all sons of bitches." At Compania Hill, Teller remembered, "I was impressed." Bethe remembered his first thought was "We've done it and his second was "What a terrible weapon have we fashioned." At North 10,000, Brixner and the others were thinking suddenly only of a kind of hazard the world had never known. "I was looking up, and I noticed there was a red haze up there, and it seemed to be coming down on us," he said.

"Pretty soon, the radiation monitors said, The radiation is rising! We've got to I said, 'That's fine, but not until I get all the film from my Amid the world's first nuclear fallout, somebody helped Brixner throw his last three cameras in an Army car, and they all got out of there fast. Film badges later showed they received low doses, by the standards of the time. About 160 men were waiting secretly north of the Jornada with enough vehicles to evacuate the small communities in the probable fallout path, and Gen. Groves had phoned Gov. John Dempsey before the test to warn him he might be asked to declare martial law.

But the radiation readings from people secretly stationed all over New Mexico stayed at what was then considered safe. Not far from Teller on Compania Hill was light cut a sharp white line across his vision. "I could see that crack for some time afterward," he says. Aeby flung off the goggles to reset his camera. "I released the shutter, cranked the diaphragm down, changed the shutter speed and fired three times in succession," he says.

"I quit at three because I was out of film." Brixner, at North 10,000, was stunned. "The whole filter seemed to light up as bright as the sun. I was temporarily blinded. I looked to the side. The Oscura mountains were as bright as day.

I saw this tremendous ball of fire, and it was rising. I was just spellbound! I followed it as it rose. Then it dawned on me. I'm the photographer! I've gotta get that ball of fire." He jogged the camera up. One thing more.

He said: "There was no sound! It all took place in absolute silence." By the time the loud blast hit, 30 seconds after the flash, most of Brixner's 55 cameras in the desert were finished. There would be 100,000 frames to develop in black-and-white and a few in the new temperamental Kodachrome. In the silence, McKibben stepped out the back door of South 10,000 and looked north over the bunker. "It was quite a pretty sight. Colored.

Purplish No doubt from the iron in the tower and a lot of soil off the ground that had been vaporized. I was surprised at the enormity of it and immediately felt it had gone big." McKibben ducked behind the bunker just as the shock wave hit "Then an amazing thing: It was followed by echoes from the mountains. There was one echo after another. A real symphony of echoes. Too bad nobody had a recorder on that It would have been played many times since then." As the shock wave hit Base Camp, Aeby saw Enrico Fermi with a handful of torn paper.

"He was dribbling it in the air. When the shock wave came, it moved the confetti. He thought for a moment" Fermi had just estimated the yield of the first nuclear explosion. It was in the ballpark. This report on the world first atomic explosion was adapted from a landmark 50th anniversary narrative written in 1995 by veteran Journal columnist Larry Calloway.

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