On Getting to the Bottom of this "Equestrian" Business

by McPoodle

Prologue: A Light Brighter Than Twelve Suns

Transcript from the episode of Eyewitness to History with Truth Delver scheduled to air on April 12, 1981. It was never broadcast.

Welcome to Trinity, New Mexico. I am surrounded by hundreds of square miles of desert and scrubland, a place where Man was not meant to tread.

In 1598, when the American Southwest was still part of the Spanish Empire, a road was constructed for use by settlers and Christian missionaries, with the name of ‘El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro’—in English, ‘The Royal Road of the Interior’. It ran from Mexico City, one thousand miles [1600 km] south of where I am standing, and continued north to the lands of the Pueblo Indians, 225 miles [250 km] north from here. The road was a rugged but endurable passage for most of its route. The major bottleneck was the 120 mile [200 km] stretch that ran alongside the western curve of the Rio Grande, full of deep arroyos, canyons, and patches of quicksand. There was a shortcut that cut 30 miles [50 km] and three days off of the travel time, but that meant that travelers had to cross a blisteringly hot, dry expanse utterly devoid of any form of nourishment whatsoever. The typical journey would cost the life of at least one pack animal, if not the weakest of the humans daring the crossing. Not without reason was this expanse called ‘La Jornada del Muerto’—The Journey of Death. La Jornada was barren, mostly flat, almost uninhabited and on many sunny days, utterly windless. It was therefore the perfect spot to test the first atomic bomb. It was named Trinity by the head of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, for reasons that he declined to discuss.

By 1945, the last year of World War II, the scientists at Los Alamos, 210 miles [340 km] north of Trinity, had completed the designs of two different atomic bombs. The first one, nicknamed ‘Little Boy’, had a Uranium-235 core that was set off by firing a bullet of the same substance at it. Little Boy was capable of taking out a small town and was relatively simple to construct and detonate. The second bomb type, called ‘Fat Man’, had a Plutonium-239 core surrounded by a Uranium-238 shell. The plutonium was capable of a bigger explosion, enough to devastate a good-sized city, but it wasn’t as unstable as the U-235 core. To set it off, you needed to use an ‘implosion lens’—a set of perfectly-timed chemical explosions designed to compress the plutonium to critical density—and then hope that the explosion didn’t immediately destroy the U-238 shell, because that was necessary to reflect enough neutrons into the growing nuclear explosion to push that into a chain reaction.

The powers that be decided that only Fat Man would be impressive enough to pressure the Empire of Japan into surrendering unconditionally. And therefore it needed to be tested.

I have here a set of reproductions, of the security passes issued to the men and women who worked on the Manhattan Project, both at Los Alamos and also at Trinity. I’ll use them to tell the story of the Trinity test, by following three men and one woman who witnessed the first atomic explosion.

First, we have Model Forecast, one of America’s brightest meteorologists. Model joined the Manhattan Project in April of ‘45, specifically to determine the safest date to stage the test. After conducting numerous readings, he recommended the early mornings of either July 19th or 21st of 1945. He was overruled—President True Man would be attending the Potsdam Conference starting on July 17th, and he needed to have a successful test as an ace in the hole for his negotiations with General-Secretary Stalin over the shape of post-war Europe. Therefore, the test would be performed at 4 am on July 16th, come hell or high water.

At 9 pm on July 15th it started raining—hard. This was exactly what Model was afraid of, but that didn’t prevent everyone at the Baker control bunker from blaming him. Not only would rain make it nearly impossible to make observations of the bomb from a safe distance, it also raised the threat that any radioactive fallout from the bomb might be flushed to inhabited areas. The rain started dying down at midnight of July 16th, but it took a very long time to do so, stopping for ten minutes at a time, then starting back up again. At 3:30 am, with the storm still not finished, a decision had to be made. The military leader of Manhattan, General Leslie Groves, met with the scientific leader of Manhattan, Dr. Oppenheimer. Between them they decided that the test would be moved from 4 to 5:30 am, just a few minutes before sunrise. Said Groves to Model, ‘And will the sky be clear by then?’ Model answered, ‘Absolutely,’ to which Groves replied, ‘It had better be, because if 5:30 comes and there’s still a cloud in the sky, I will hang you.’

At this point Model Forecast had fulfilled his duty, so he chose to mingle with the rest of the scientists and soldiers at Baker. I should explain that three wooden bunkers were constructed for those observing and controlling the test. Each bunker was mostly buried under huge layers of earth, with the walls reinforced with concrete. The bunkers were placed 10,000 yards [5.7 miles, or 9.1 km] away from Ground Zero. The one 10,000 yards south was Baker, the control bunker. The north bunker was Able and the west bunker was Pittsburg.

One of the scientists waiting at Baker was Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born scientist who had created the first sustained nuclear reaction in 1942. On seeing the restlessness induced by the hour-and-a-half weather delay, Fermi proposed a betting pool, a particular passion of his. A few days ago, he had set one up on how powerful the explosion would be: Oppenheimer had bet that it would be equivalent to 200 tons of T.N.T., Cino Cycle, the head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos, had bet on 8,000 tons. For tonight’s pool, Fermi picked a much more macabre topic: what were the odds that the bomb, which would generate temperatures never before seen in the history of the planet, would be hot enough to ignite the atmosphere, wiping out all life on earth? Or maybe just New Mexico would be wiped off the face of the Earth—who wanted to put $10 down on that? The soldiers, and even some of the engineers, got rather nervous on hearing this talk, until they were reassured by Model Forecast that it was all an old joke of Fermi’s: You see, the question of ‘atmosphere ignition’ had come up from the moment scientists began to gather at Los Alamos in mid-1943. The question was assigned to Pr. Cycle, who passed it on to Gus Guiseman, the head of the Computation Group. Now in those days, actual electronic computers were few and far between, so the term ‘computer’ usually referred to a person (almost always a young woman) given the job of performing complex mathematical computations. Guiseman and ‘his girls’ had computed the ‘thermal opacity ratio of the fission reaction’ (whatever that means), and luckily for humanity it failed to generate a high enough temperature to trigger the deadly atmospheric chain reaction that Fermi had proposed. Model knew all this of course because Fermi had tried to terrorize him with the apocalyptic scenario within days of starting his job at Trinity.

The rain finally stopped at 4 am, thereby saving Model’s neck. A team drove out from Baker to Ground Zero at 5 am in a jeep to arm the bomb, returning at 5:10. That was when Samuel King Allison, one of the main organizers of the Manhattan project, began reading the world’s first countdown over Baker’s loudspeakers and shortwave radio.

At 5:25, Allison announced that there were five minutes left until detonation. At this point Model, along with all other non-essential personnel, left the safety of the bunker and lined up behind it, so that they’d have a chance to see this once-in-a-lifetime event for themselves. Following a protocol established by Infra Stellar, they all laid face down in the dirt, with their feet pointing towards Ground Zero. Hands were held over eyes, and placed next to each of them was the crude instrument they would use when instructed to watch the explosion: a pair of welder’s goggles inserted into a hole in a piece of sheet metal, with a little wooden handle mounted on the side to hold the assembly over your face. Behind them they could hear Allison’s voice over the loudspeaker, except when it was interrupted by the strains of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, breaking in from an Albuquerque radio station using the same frequency:

‘Zero minus ten seconds—ni—[dun-tun da dun-ta-dun! da]—six—five—four—three—two—one—Now!’

Ah, but what happened next is the ending of our story, and we’re not ready for that yet. Let’s put Model Forecast aside for now, rewind time, and look at the same events from a new perspective.

---

This is the security badge held by Gus Guiseman. Gus was a theoretical physicist, recently graduated with a Ph.D. from Princeton, but he was really good at almost any problem you threw at him. And so he ended up heading Computation, and when at the end of the project the human computers were replaced by the mechanical ones from IBM, he pretty much invented the concept of multi-tasking, the only way the machines would be able to do their highly complex calculations faster than the humans they were designed to replace.

Gus was on leave through most of June and into July of 1945. He came back just in time for Trinity. His designated gathering point was Compañía Hill, an observation post 20 miles [32 km] northwest of Ground Zero. This was where the non-scientific VIP’s were assembled, including Journey Scoop. Journey was a science reporter for the New York Times. He had attracted the attention of the officials at the Manhattan Project with his May 1940 headlining story about the state of nuclear research at the time, pulling together all sorts of clues to deduce that the world was on the verge of a new weapon, and that Nazi Germany stood a good chance of developing it first. He was of course wrong about his ultimate conclusion, but very close to being completely right about everything else. He was therefore approached to be the official reporter of both this test and afterwards the Nagasaki bombing (he was aboard the observation plane The Great Artiste for the latter operation).

Guiseman was late. Also, the only shortwave radio at Compañía Hill was busted, so nobody knew what was going on. Journey spent his time interviewing the other participants. Cino Cycle and Infra Stellar were both European immigrants and both were recent converts to Markism, with very similar marks: Cycle had the sun in cross-section, while Stellar had a sun dominated by its corona. So Journey asked them for their mark stories:

Cycle, born Hans Bethe, was a German physicist travelling through Europe on fellowships when he met and married his Jewish wife, leading him to take a job with Cornell University in America in 1935 (which is when he converted and changed his name). He soon became known as the nation’s leading theoretical physicist. (Einstein didn’t count by this point, as he was retired.) In 1938, at a conference dedicated to the topic, Cycle worked out the chain reactions that power stars, both in the sun and in larger stars. The publication of this work not only earned Cycle his mark, but also the Nobel Prize in 1967.

Stellar was a Jewish Hungarian, born as Ede Teller in 1908. His experience of the turbulence of that country in the 1920’s instilled a lifelong hatred of both sides fighting for the soul of the country: Fascism and Communism. He lost his foot in a streetcar accident soon after moving to Munich, Germany, in 1926. Like Cycle, he travelled around Europe, meeting Enrico Fermi as well as numerous other scientists. In 1935, he was able to escape Germany with his wife to become a professor at George Washington University. He joined the Manhattan Project in 1942. Soon afterward, in a conversation with Fermi, he got the idea of using the yet-to-be-created fission bomb to set off an even bigger bomb, the Hydrogen Bomb, or as he called it, ‘The Super’. From this point he became convinced that the atomic bomb was a waste of time in and of itself, and only the Super would be capable of winning the war. To prove that ‘the Goddess was on his side’, he converted to Markism, and immediately got his solar-themed mark. Stellar of course later became the father of the H-Bomb. It’s also generally agreed that the titular character of Doctor Strangelove was a devastating parody of the man (in all respects except being an ex-Nazi).

At 3:30, with the radio still broken, the guests at Compañía Hill thought the bomb was going to go off in a half hour, so a picnic breakfast was passed out for everyone to eat. Guiseman finally showed up as the meal was being concluded. He set himself to work on the radio and immediately fixed it, so now everyone knew they had another hour and a half to wait. Journey explained to the gathering that he had been tasked to write several alternative cover stories, to be used by regional radio stations and newspapers, to explain the upcoming explosion.

The first possibility was that the bomb would be a dud. That one was easy, as no story needed to be released. The next was an explosion so small that more people heard it than saw it: that would be passed off as a local earthquake. Next came the story for the most-desirable outcome, informing the public that an ammunition magazine at a nearby military base had gone off. And finally was the story that started with the ammunition magazine explosion, but included blanks for informing the public who had died in the accident. Of course, Journey admitted, if that last one was released, it would pretty much count as the obituary of everyone gathered at Trinity.

Time passed slowly. Guiseman fidgeted, wandered around, grabbed random items from people and started juggling them until demanded to stop, and asked repeatedly if anybody else had anything else to fix. Guiseman was a notorious troublemaker at Los Alamos, sending out ciphered letters just to mess with the government censors who opened and read every letter going in or out of the various Manhattan Project labs to make sure that no vital secrets were being revealed. On finding that the crucial paperwork, describing to any potential spy how to build an atomic bomb, were locked in file cabinets secured with nothing more than tumbler locks, Guiseman taught himself locksmithing, just so he could demonstrate how National Security could be compromised in ‘20 seconds flat’.

While Guiseman was trying to find something to do with himself, Stellar calmly applied heavy sunscreen to all of his exposed skin in the pre-dawn darkness, then passed the tube on to Cycle.

5:25 finally came, and with it the announcement that there was five minutes until detonation. Infra Stellar organized the group and arrayed them according to his protocol, all lying face down in the dirt. Guiseman lay there for a few seconds, before jumping to his feet. ‘This is stupid,’ he announced to the crowd. ‘If we’re going to be exposed to radiation from the explosion, then we will be completely exposed, regardless of how we orient ourselves. And I’m not using any welder’s goggles—I want to see this thing with my bare eyes.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Guiseman!’ Stellar cried out, his voice muffled by dirt. ‘At the very least, looking right at the bomb when it goes off will blind you for life!’

‘That is a lie, and you know it,’ Guiseman countered, as he walked over to a jeep that was pointed at Ground Zero and sat down in the driver’s seat. ‘True, the ultraviolet output of the explosion could cause permanent damage, but by watching it through this glass windshield, I will only be exposed to light from the visible spectrum. Under these circumstances, the worst that will happen is that I will be temporarily blinded.’

And so he sat, and waited. He didn’t have to wait long, until—

‘Zero minus ten seconds—ni—[dun-tun da dun-ta-dun! da]—six—five—four—three—two—one—Now!’

We are very nearly ready to tell what happened in the moments after that fateful ‘Now!’, but I have one more pair of eyewitnesses to history to introduce you to.

---

This is the security badge of the chemist Stable Solution. Stable was 25 years old in 1945. He was the designer of the electrical switching device behind the Fat Man implosion lens. He also had the dubious honor of being the last man to see the actual bomb before it exploded. In his own words, ‘Oppenheimer was really terribly worried about the fact that the thing was so complicated and so many people knew exactly how it was put together that it would be easy to sabotage. So he thought someone had better baby sit it right up until the moment it was fired. They asked for volunteers and as the youngest guy present, I was selected. I don’t know if it was that I was most expendable or best able to climb a 100-foot tower!’

Yes, the bomb was located inside a wooden shed mounted at the top of a 100 foot [30 m] tower. The reason it was mounted that high was because of plans to detonate the Japanese bombs at that altitude after being dropped from bomber planes.

Stable drove out to the tower at Ground Zero at 9 pm on July 15th. If you recall, this is precisely when it began raining cats and dogs. Stable had to climb to the top of that tower in pouring rain, and then try to dry out in the tiny shack at the top when he finally got there. The shack had open air windows letting the rain in, a naked light bulb to see by, a primitive telephone connected to an identical device at the base of the tower for communications, and assorted odds and ends left during the hurried construction of the site to amuse himself with. Oh, and finally there was the gadget—’gadget’ being the code word for discussing the bomb over channels that might be overheard by the enemy. The gadget was a metal sphere five feet [1.5 m] in diameter, its surface studded with bolts and crossed with electrical cables, all converging in a boxlike enclosure. That box was connected to another box at the bottom of the tower, and that box was connected to the Baker control bunker nearly six miles away by a thick strand of wires snaking south along the flat desert landscape.

Stable Solution sat right next to the bomb, trying not to think about what would happen if a stray lightning bolt happened to connect with the bomb or any of that six miles of electrical cables. For three hours, his job was to sit up there and guard the gadget from ‘Nazi saboteurs’. Oh, and to deal with any other catastrophes that might cause the bomb to go off before 4 am. He was trying to steady his nerves by reading a book by the light of that single naked light bulb the shed was equipped with, a book he had picked up in the humor section of the bookstore. The book wasn’t working.

At midnight of July 16th, the telephone installed in the shed suddenly started ringing, causing Stable to toss his book high in the air. ‘Uh—um, Solution here,’ he said into the phone.

‘This is Lt. Bush, standing a hundred feet below you. You’re hereby relieved.’

‘Oh thank the Goddess,’ Stable said, hanging up. He briefly tried to find the book in the piles of broken tools and other junk, but soon gave up. After turning off the light, he climbed down the ladder and through the continuing thunderstorm to meet with his replacement. Lt. Bush was no scientist, so he wasn’t allowed to go any closer to the bomb than the tent at the bottom of the tower. Stable got into his jeep, which was now parked next to Lt. Bush’s jeep—

And found that it failed to start. This should hardly be a surprise—the jeeps were used to regularly cover the 400 mile (650 km) round trip between Trinity and Los Alamos, had been exposed to the punishing heat of La Jornada, and now the sudden soaking rainstorm. It was a wonder that more of them hadn’t failed already.

He called the lieutenant out to help him look the jeep over. They couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with it, and yet it wouldn’t start. Too bad Gus Guiseman was nowhere near.

‘Well maybe I can take your jeep back to Baker?’ Stable suggested.

‘What, and leave me to out-run this thing if it goes off early?’ Bush asked. (Apparently, Lt. Bush had a high degree of confidence that he could out-drive an atomic explosion.)

‘Oh all right,’ Stable said. He turned on the short-wave radio in Bush’s jeep. ‘Solution to Baker. Solution to Baker. We have a little problem with a busted jeep. Could you please send another one out to pick me up?’

‘Negative, Solution,’ replied the voice of Samuel King Allison. ‘We currently have no jeeps to spare, and we need you out here on the panel. Look, you’re less than five minutes’ drive from here, so both of you drive back in the good jeep then Bush can return. We’ll keep our eyes out for anybody approaching the gadget.’

Stable and Bush agreed with this plan, and drove back. Then Bush returned to guard the gadget.

Stable’s night was not over. There were two men in control of whether the bomb would go off or not. Joe McKibben had a switch to flip at one minute before detonation that would automate the rest of the process. And Stable Solution was in control of the kill switch.

As soon as he sat down, Stable was confronted with a crisis, a crisis too crazy to be anything but true.

‘Pittsburg to all units,’ reported the shortwave radio. Just to remind you, Pittsburg was the name of the western bunker.

Stable looked around. It appeared that he was the designated radio voice of Baker now. He picked up the microphone and keyed it. ‘Baker. What’s on, Pittsburg?’ he asked.

‘Stand by, Baker. Some kinda trouble outside.’ Faintly, another sound could be heard over the radio. It sounded like a barking dog.

Another voice cut in: ‘Baker, are we holding?’ This was coming from Able, the third bunker.

Stable looked briefly back at a bored Oppenheimer before taking initiative. ‘Negative, Able. No hold. Pittsburg, get a line on that disturbance and report on the double. Wait, first do you have visibility? Over.’

‘Pittsburg here. Affirmative to visibility; the rain appears to have stopped for the time being. I’ll find out what’s going on outside and get back to you. Over.’

Yet another voice cut in, that of Lt. Bush: ‘Baker, this is Zero. The searchlight from Pittsburg has left the tower. I repeat: the tower is no longer illuminated. I’ll drive over there and find out what’s wrong.’ The sound of a jeep starting up and setting off could then be heard.

This got the attention of both Oppenheimer and General Groves, each of whom placed a hand on Stable’s shoulder.

A stressed-out Stable groaned in frustration. ‘Lieutenant, did you just turn your radio on? Pittsburg has matters under control. You will return to your post and not leave the tower unguarded. Do you copy? Lieutenant Bush, do you copy?’

The line from Pittsburg opened up, but all that could be heard was continual barking, which then sputtered into silence. A few seconds later, the voice of the western bunker returned: ‘Pittsburg to Baker. Just some buzzard raisin’ hell with the guard dog. I chased it away.’

Stable laughed nervously. ‘Roger, Pittsburg. Could you please check to see if a jeep is heading your way from Zero?’

‘Will do, Baker. Just give me a few seconds to relay your request up the ladder.’

‘Baker, this is Zero again. Searchlight is back on the tower, so I will be returning to my post. Also, my radio appears to have a malfunction—it’s turning itself off a few seconds after I stop talking. Please advise.’

‘Head back to Zero,’ Stable said quickly.

‘Roger,’ replied Lt. Bush.

Stable reached over and flicked a communication override switch. ‘You should now be hearing me from the speaker mounted at the base of the tower.’

‘Baker, I am still several hundred feet away from my post, so I couldn’t make out everything you said, but I’m guessin’ that you’ll be using the tower speaker to communicate?’

‘Affirmative.’

‘Understood, Baker. And, could you do something about this spotlight that’s following my every move? Over.’

Stable rolled his eyes, knowing full well that Pittsburg heard every word of that previous conversation, and could have put the light back at any moment. ‘Pittsburg, thank you kindly for your services,’ he said in the calmest voice he could muster. ‘You may now return your searchlight to the tower.’

‘All you had to do was ask, Baker,’ answered Pittsburg, accompanied by the sounds of raucous laughter in the background.

Stable slumped down as the two hands removed themselves from his shoulder.

‘Pittsburg to Able. One of our eyes just caught a movement on the tower. Can you confirm? Over.’

Stable suddenly felt like his veins were pumping ice-water instead of blood. He hovered his finger over the kill switch.

‘Negative, Pittsburg,’ answered Lt. Bush’s voice. ‘This is Zero, and there are no intruders here. And now I see Able’s searchlight, so I’ll get off the line.’

‘Able here. We see nobody on the tower or in the shack, raising doubts as to Pittsburg’s sobriety. We also see Bush waving his arms like Robinson Crusoe.’

Two voices cut in, speaking the same words at nearly the same time. ‘Hey, I heard that!’

Stable pulled briefly at his hair with the hand not about to flick the kill switch. ‘Cut the chatter, Zero and Pittsburg. Able, return your spotlight to its usual search pattern. Pittsburg, do you have anything further to say?’

‘I’m going to say it was another bird, Baker. Come to think of it, the colors were too mottled to be a person.’

‘Roger, Pittsburg,’ Stable said with a sigh of relief. ‘Glad to hear you say it.’

And so it was that a bird, probably a roadrunner given the setting, nearly sabotaged Project Trinity.

All of this was around midnight. Since Stable Solution is not going to do anything for several hours, let’s turn our attention to his wife, our final witness. Gillian Gesinek was born in a small town outside Prague in the Czech Republic, the daughter of an industrial chemist. Her family moved to Berlin to improve their fortunes, but soon became the victims of anti-Semitic threats after the rise of the Nazi Party, and relocated to Montclair, New Jersey, in 1933. She attended college at Bryn Mawr and after graduating in 1942 moved on to graduate work in chemistry at Harvard. A year later she married Stable Solution and converted to Markism, taking the name Precipitated Solution, or ‘Precip’ for short. She followed her husband to Los Alamos in 1944. Originally, she worked on studying the chemical properties of plutonium, but then the powers that be decided that such work ‘was too dangerous for a woman’ (specifically to their ability to bear children) and she was moved into the explosive lens unit, which while it was perfectly safe for her womb, stood an equal chance of killing her on any given day as her former job. Similarly when the idea of the Trinity test was proposed, General Groves put out a mandate that no women be allowed to participate, witness the test, or even be told that it was happening, to protect their delicate sensibilities. Precip was easily able to figure out what was going on, and organized a viewing party of herself, Betty Thomas and David Anderson in a car that she drove. Betty Thomas was the wife of Earl Thomas, a physicist who watched the test from Base Camp; David Anderson was a co-worker of Precip’s that wasn’t considered important enough to invite to the test. They stopped on the summit of Sandia Peak, a 10,000-foot [3 km] tall mountain located half-way between Los Alamos and Trinity, and therefore 110 miles [175 km] north of Ground Zero. They spent the night in sleeping bags waiting for a pre-dawn explosion. Precip didn’t have a shortwave radio in her car, so there was no way for her to monitor all of the communications going on between the bunkers, nor could she hear the countdown.

Returning to Stable Solution’s story, at 3:30 came the decision to delay the test; around this time the last of the scientists arrived at Baker from Base Camp. (Trinity Base Camp was located 10 miles [16 km] south of Ground Zero. It was where most of the Trinity personnel lived while the rest of the site was being set up, and where the mountains of food and especially water were sent on a weekly basis to keep them alive.) While Fermi was organizing his ‘end of the world’ betting pool, Oppenheimer made a bet with George Kistiakowsky, the dour Ukrainian scientist who designed the explosive lenses: if the bomb failed to go off, Kistiakowsky would have to pay Oppenheimer a month’s salary. If it worked, Oppenheimer owed Kistiakowsky $10. Kistiakowsky also bet on the 1,400 ton slot in Fermi’s explosive yield lottery.

At 4:30, the sun rose over Sandia Peak, and Precip and their party concluded that the bomb test had failed, as there was no way that it would be postponed later than sunrise. They had forgotten that the sun rises earlier the higher your elevation and that therefore it was still dark at Ground Zero. They took their time cleaning up and getting packed for the long drive back to Los Alamos.

At 5 am, Kistiakowsky, McKibben and a few others drove out to Ground Zero to arm the gadget from the base of the tower. Since the nearest mechanic with a security clearance was back in Los Alamos, it was decided that the busted jeep would be allowed to suffer the full brunt of the explosion, ‘as a test of the effect of the new weapon on American automotive technology.’ Two jeeps returned to Baker, along with Lt. Bush. The gadget was now alone, kept company only by the voice from the loudspeaker: ‘Zero minus twenty minutes.’ General Groves got into one of the just-returned jeeps to drive down to Base Camp. This was just in case the bomb turned out to be more powerful than was originally thought. Taking his place as military commander at Baker was Groves’ right-hand man, Brigadier Thomas Farrell.

Stable Solution stayed at his post, ready at any minute to abort the operation and shoulder the blame that would result if he made a bad call. At 5:29 am, he turned his head and noticed Oppenheimer standing next to Farrell, one hand tightly gripping a nearby post and barely breathing. ‘You know,’ Stable joked, ‘with all of this stress, it’s a wonder I don’t hit this switch with this twitchy hand of mine.’ Oppenheimer reacted by looking coldly around for somebody to replace Stable. ‘Kidding, kidding!’ Stable cried.

‘Zero minus ten seconds—ni—[dun-tun da dun-ta-dun! da]—six—five—four—three—two—one—Now!’

---

Despite their eyes being closed and covered, the majority of witnesses to the Trinity Test knew the instant when the bomb went off. That was because the entire landscape around them was suddenly illuminated by daylight. No, more than that—by the light of a dozen suns. Model Forecast’s first instinct was to check himself to be sure he was still alive. Despite the brilliant light, all was silent, thanks to the fact that the speed of light is so much faster than the speed of sound. The scientists at Baker cheered then formed a spontaneous conga line.

Gus Guiseman was the only person looking directly at the bomb when it went off. He took the precaution of covering one eye with his hand because, as he had predicted, that one exposed eye was temporarily blinded less than a second after detonation. ‘I don’t think I can describe what it was that I saw,’ he reported later. ‘It was like I suddenly had access to the entire light spectrum, from radio to gamma waves. I may have seen Creation itself, but it was far more likely that my optic nerve just went nuts due to sensory overload.’ He calmly switched eyes, and continued his observation.

Stable Solution was still inside Baker bunker when the bomb went off and the inside of the tight space was suddenly flooded with light from the open door. Oppenheimer turned to Fermi and merely said, ‘It worked,’ before Fermi raced outside.

Precip was sitting in the car reaching for the ignition key when the sky suddenly bloomed right through the windshield glass. The distant clouds rolled and boiled, turning every color of the rainbow.

That’s what Guiseman observed as well, a rapidly expanding cloud, the top of which glowed an otherworldly violet color, a color he knew full well to be caused by the massive ionization of the air caused by all of the radiation being produced by the explosion. (By the way, that particular color can’t be picked up with motion picture film, just in case you’re wondering why all the footage you see on TV of atomic explosions are more orange than purple.)

Twenty-seven seconds later, the shockwave caught up with Baker. To Model, it sounded like an express train had passed him by inches. Fermi used the wave to perform an experiment: he shredded up a piece of notebook paper and dropped the shreds slowly to the ground, both before and during the shockwave. Since there was no wind, he could use the displacement of the paper to calculate the energy of the bomb. The result of his calculations was 10,000 tons of T.N.T., making Cycle the winner of the betting pool. (Actually, Fermi turned out to be wrong—the true figure was 18,000 tons.) Kistiakowsky, who was on his way out of the bunker, was knocked over. He got right back up, turned to Oppenheimer who had emerged after him, and slapped the man on the back, exclaiming, ‘Oppie, you owe me ten dollars!’

By 5:45, a handful of observers at Baker had used the available jeeps to drive back to Base Camp. Stable Solution, who had been up for nearly 24 hours, headed straight for his bed and crashed. General Groves greeted Robert Oppenheimer, saying simply, ‘I am proud of you.’—his decision to put the mild scientist in control of the project had paid off. Groves’ assistant Brigadier Farrell shook his hand. ‘The war is over,’ he declared. ‘Yes, after we drop two of these on Japan,’ answered Groves.

Opinions on the test at Base Camp were all over the place. ‘My God, it’s beautiful!’ one witness exclaimed. Another replied, ‘No, it’s terrible.’ Kenneth Bainbridge, the man in charge of constructing the Trinity site, looked Oppenheimer in the face and proclaimed ‘Now we’re all sons of bitches.’ [Can I say that on TV? Could I get away with just a censor bleep?]

One of the VIPs at Base Camp was Charles Allen Thomas, vice-president of the Monsanto Corporation and director of chemical research. For the Manhattan Project, he developed techniques to purify polonium and beryllium for use as trigger materials. On witnessing the multi-colored detonation of Trinity’s bomb, he declared it to be ‘the single greatest event in the history of mankind.’ Later, he described the bomb as looking ‘like a giant mushroom; the stalk was the thousands of tons of sand being sucked up by the explosion; the top of the mushroom was a flowering ball of fire. It resembled a giant brain the convolutions of which were constantly changing.’

Oppenheimer’s reaction is the one that is most quoted; here I’ll give it in context, from an interview conducted years afterward: ‘We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita.

‘Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

‘I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.’

Although that is the most-remembered reaction, I am more impressed by the words of George Kistiakowsky: ‘I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last men will see what we saw.’

5:45 was also the approximate time when the shockwave from the bomb finally reached Sandia Peak. The three observers in Precip’s car had faithfully waited until it arrived, sounding much like thunder. Then the car was started for real and the party drove back to civilization. At a diner near Albuquerque, the server asked them if they had seen the explosion in the southern sky, and they feigned ignorance. A day later Stable finally caught up with her at Los Alamos—he spent a couple days mostly sleeping. After she got back and thought about what she had seen, Precip signed a petition to have the next bomb exploded on an uninhabited island with the Japanese invited to watch, in hopes of ending the war without the devastating death toll of two atomic bombs. The petition disappeared before it ever reached anybody of authority.

A few years after the war, Stable and his wife were approached by a Japanese immigrant who assured them that the bomb they had worked on had saved lives, including members of his family living on the outskirts of Hiroshima. Precip resigned herself to the notion that the atomic bomb did more good than harm. Stable Solution’s faith on this point never wavered.

Hand-written addition to the above, added five years later:

The idea of doing an episode about Trinity was one that I pursued regularly ever since the 25th anniversary of the test in 1970. The government finally allowed me access to the location and a redacted set of official documents early in 1981. I never questioned the reason for the sudden change of heart—maybe it was because of who had just been elected President. Nevertheless, the general in charge of the base reserved the right of final review. Something in the episode offended him—perhaps my digs at Pr. Stellar—and as a result my tapes were confiscated, but not before I was able to get this transcript written up.

Despite the unusual candor I was greeted with in the early stages of my research, there was one story that I believe was deliberately withheld from me, a story I would have undoubtedly featured in the episode if I had only known it. I hereby present the final Eyewitness to History for the Trinity Test, July 16, 1945:

To begin with, Gus Guiseman arrived in Los Alamos, New Mexico on July 15th with plenty of time to reach Compañía Hill along with everyone else. What caused him to be late was a piece of paper left on his desk. Written on the paper was the number ‘1.8574583621’, the digits written with the air of one who has long since memorized them. The handwriting of the note, Gus was convinced, could have only come from one person: his Chief Computer.

Gus Guiseman’s Chief Computer was a Hopi Indian barely out of her teens, a tall and statuesque beauty that tended to dominate any room she was in. Guiseman used to claim that she glowed with a sort of inner light, as if she carried the warmth of the New Mexico desert wherever she went. Her appearance was very atypical of a member of her tribe: white skin with only a trace of pink coloration, and long hair separated into bands of multiple pastel colors. Adorned on her clothing at all times was a white badge the size of her hand, painted with her mark, a stylized sun. Her Markian name was of course Celestia, but to keep her straight from the others, we’ll call her Crystal, the English translation of her birth name and the name used most often by the scientists at Los Alamos, including her boss, Gus Guiseman.

There’s a lot I have to read into the terse account Guiseman left for posterity. For one thing, he does not explain why that number should have filled him with a feeling of dread, but his following actions make that point abundantly clear. He was under orders to arrive at Compañía Hill at midnight, but instead he called up Crystal’s priest, and practically forced him to get out of bed and go check on her. He waited a half hour for the reply call that informed him that Crystal had snuck out of her home in nearby Santa Fe a few hours earlier.

Gus always got along well with the ladies of Los Alamos, so he knew full well who was going to watch the bomb despite the official ban, and where. He called up Sawyer’s Hill, which in the winter was used by the scientists as their own private ski run, and got in contact with the group gathered there. They told him they hadn’t seen Crystal since the start of his leave of absence a month and a half earlier. He called a trailer camp outside Carrizozo, New Mexico, where Al and Elizabeth Graves were monitoring the air with a Geiger counter for the world’s first radioactive fallout, despite Liz being seven months pregnant—Crystal wasn’t there, either. He couldn’t contact Sandia Peak, where Precip Solution and her party were waiting (as they had no phones or radios), but he was able to call both Base Camp and Baker. Someone thought they had seen the Chief Computer at Base Camp, but that had been hours ago. Gus exceeded his authority by ordering the MPs to find her and put her under arrest, ostensibly for violating General Groves’ order about ‘no women at Trinity’. It turned out, though, that he was too late.

Crystal probably arrived at Ground Zero in the back of Stable Solution’s jeep, covered in the bright Hopi blankets that were ubiquitous at both Los Alamos and Trinity. She most certainly was the one to sabotage that jeep. The reason she did this was simple—with the maddening security precautions in place, the only place she could hide was under it.

Crystal in fact was the figure spotted by the man at the Pittsburg bunker climbing the ladder, but with the blankets she had wrapped around her, she was mistaken for the bird who had attacked Pittsburg’s guard dog, and had snuck into the shack at the top before that sighting could be collaborated. She had then probably used some bent nails and a broken hammer to cover up one or more windows with cardboard or perhaps the Army gray blanket she could have also taken from the jeep.

Gus Guiseman, having done everything he could from Los Alamos, then took a jeep down to Compañía Hill. He wanted to go further, to Base Camp to supervise the search for Crystal, but he had run out of time, as well as running out the patience of the security personnel at the site. The joking, the juggling—they were all ways he tried to cope with having no more control over the situation, of having a gut feeling that his employee was deliberately putting herself in danger, but being unable to do anything about it. And he made himself watch the Bomb, so he would never forget.

In September of 1945, two months after the Trinity Test and one month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General Groves, Robert Oppenheimer, Journey Scoop and a group of dignitaries visited Trinity Ground Zero. They all wore white canvas overshoes, to prevent them tracking radioactive fallout from the site. They were the first visitors who were not protected by the lumbering lead-lined tanks that had performed the original recognizance. For an area with a radius of a half-mile, the sand had been melted into a radioactive green glass dubbed ‘trinitite’. Every living thing within a mile was annihilated—even ants. The stench of death had lasted three weeks. The remains of the tower, the shack and the jeep were no more than a few random scraps of metal found embedded in the green glass. With the group of otherwise high-ranking government officials (and the official reporter) was Gus Guiseman, with no explanation given of why he was allowed to accompany them. Early on, he left the rest of the group to perform a personal search. It took him the better part of an hour, but he finally found what he was looking for, a remnant that had survived by some freak of nature. What he found was an object that Crystal held in almost as much reverence as her Mark plaque: her class ring from Santa Fe High School. When Gus dug it out of the trinitite, it had melted into the shape of an infinity symbol. This convinced him that his Chief Computer had truly died at Trinity.

Crystal’s priest had renounced his title in a note dated July 16th. He had fled over the Mexican border a day later, and was never seen again.

Of course, the core of the mystery is unresolved: why did this woman sneak her way through a massively-paranoid security system, climb up that hundred-foot ladder to come into the presence of the world’s first atomic bomb—and then just sit there for more than five hours, listening to Samuel King Allison’s countdown broadcast loudly through the speaker a hundred feet below her, waiting for it to explode?

It’s a mystery that will never have a definitive solution. If I may be presumptuous enough to go inside the mind of Gus Guiseman, it must have seemed a thing inevitable, fated to be. Crystal was the Iphigenia at Aulis of the Atomic Age, the innocent who had to die so that the Bomb might live.

But only the Goddess knows for sure.

This was followed by one final note in a different hand:

No you idiot—1.8574583621 is the thermal opacity ratio of the fission reaction—the result of the very first calculation that Gus and Crystal had performed together. If she had only botched that calculation, or convinced Gus to rely on the incorrect ratio calculated by Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in 1938—one that was a hundred times bigger than the true figure—then the Manhattan Project would have been abandoned as being too dangerous to carry through, and perhaps the Cold War would never have started.

Celestia did what Celestia always does—she took responsibility for her actions, and when it’s far too late for a practical solution, she’ll always resort to the symbolic. Sabotaging the test would be ultimately pointless, so she gave herself up as a human sacrifice to atone for everything that would come out of the events of July 15, 1945—from the bombings of Japan already being planned on that date to the inevitable apocalyptic end to the Cold War that will overtake humanity any day now.