under the old squash court at the University of Chicago, say the
seeds of apocalypse were sown at the Earth’s very beginning. But
for argument’s sake, start in New Mexico, where the >rst atomic
device exploded in the desert one morning in July.
Drive the wide freeway to Albuquerque, past adobe houses
and mitt-shaped buttes, anvil clouds and remnants of Route 66,
and pull over at the National Atomic Museum. The exhibits
there explain the preparations involved in the making of the >rst
atomic bomb, with thumbnail biographies of the scientists
working on the Manhattan Project. One of the most interesting
things on display is an old copy of the Los Alamos newspaper.
Dated June 25, 1945, the Bulletin lists the movies to be shown at
the compound’s theater; it scolds the mystery person who’s been
pocketing the knives from the mess hall and promises that no
new ones will replace those stolen.
None of this would be all that noteworthy were it not for the
fact that the Trinity test is less than a month away. There will be
a blinding ?ash and rolling thunder, hot wind and shock waves,
but in the meantime someone on the base has lost a “
longhaired black Persian cat with yellow eyes, wearing a collar with
bell”; someone else misses “a Buick hub cap,” o=ering a reward
for its return. The list of items for sale includes a “Large,
strong, varnished clothes basket. Used 1 month as bassinet.
$3.50.” This bears out what I’ve read about the growing Los
Alamos maternity ward, as does the wanted to buy list, which
includes a request for a “Good baby buggy. Call 496.” Trinity’s
plutonium core will arrive at the test site three days early; someone will drive it down from Los Alamos to Jornada del Muerto
in the back seat of a ’ 42 Plymouth. A good family car.
AND WE ARE IN A STRANGE NEW LAND
—“The Atomic Age,” editorial, Life, August 20, 1945
Does Rock City show our past or our future? Without the ultraviolet light, it’s the past—nursery rhymes, fairy tales, a garden
as static as something preserved under glass. But the ultraviolet
light shows the future, a place radiant with garish color. The
familiar fairy tales are transformed by this luminous color
scheme into something peculiarly atomic age. I read about the
workers, mostly women, who painted the glowing tips of alarm-clock hands. They licked their paintbrushes to get a >ne point;
at night, their skin, clothes, and hair glowed. The radium in the
paint gave them bone cancer, and they >led suit in 1927. By
court day, they were too weak to raise their right hands. This
strange light makes innocent stories sinister, recognizable but
changed. The atomic calves grazing in the desert during Trinity
look normal but for their dusting of white. Swept with fire and
steel, as with a broom. Seared everywhere the fallout touched.
Before Trinity, the scientists at Los Alamos made a wager.
Would the bomb set the Earth’s atmosphere on >re, and if it did,
would the consequences be local or global? They liked betting,
those physicists; in another pool, each of them guessed how
much power the bomb would have, as compared to tons of TNT.
(Twenty thousand.) The man who won happened to come in
late, after all the reasonable >gures had been taken. Out of
politeness, he guessed what seemed like a ridiculously high >
g-ure, and it turned out he was the closest.
At the moment of detonation—July 16, 1945, 5: 30 a.m.—a
passenger was on her way to morning music class. She saw the
bright ?ash of light and thought it was the sunrise. What was
that? she asked her brother. She saw the explosion, this woman,
even though she was stone blind. Hadn’t it seemed like any
other morning? Maybe the brother drove a little too fast through
town, running late, past the still-dark >lling station, radio dimly
on. Suddenly a blast of light, unlike anything ever seen, and
what must he have thought, the brother?—blind too, at that
moment, and too stunned to steady the car. No word for
thought, not at >rst, silence then thunder and hot wind as not
far away, the physicists lifted their faces from the ground, and
Oppenheimer thought of a line from the Bhagavad-Gita: I am
become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
It smelled funny, the rancher said, standing in the desert as
the fallout rained down. Was that the vaporized jackrabbits, kangaroo rats, greasewood, killed at the moment of detonation,
