Trinity

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WHAT I KNOW, FROM EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF THE FINAL twenty-four hours, is this: on the afternoon of July 15, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer drives to the steel shot tower that rises one hundred feet from the desert.

He steps out of the jeep. The wind is blowing harder now, as Oppenheimer walks to the tower. He climbs one rung at a time, the warm metal pressing his palms. When he reaches the top, he pulls himself up to the platform and stands in the shack the technicians built: a roof and three corrugated metal walls, one open side facing west.

There, he inspects the device. In its cradle, it stands as tall as his head: a ten-thousand-pound metal capsule, looped and plugged with detonators. The first nuclear bomb. The work of the last three years of his life.

It’s Oppenheimer who managed to persuade General Groves to run a full-scale test of the weapon. Groves would have delivered the bombs without testing, on the basis of the theoretical group’s calculations. A test, Groves felt, was a waste of millions of dollars of plutonium that had taken the army years to extract.

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