Today is the 64th anniversary of the Atomic Age, which opened at 05:29 a.m. “Mountain War Time” 16 July 1945 over the sands of Trinity, New Mexico.
Today we pause and remember the day we became as gods.
So far, we’ve managed not to kill ourselves.
The headline is my favorite quote from Lansing Lamont’s Trinity, a good, quick read on the Manhattan Project. It’s from chapter 9: “July 16, 1945: Zero Minus One Hour”.
At 5 seconds the cameras began churning…. Julian Mack perched in his machine gun turret [converted to a camera turret]…Suddenly he smelled smoke. The power generator in his turret had overheated and caught fire. The turret was ablaze. An assistant shouted that he was turning off the power. “No, no!” Mack screamed. “The cameras are still running! Let it burn!”
In the control center [announcer] Sam Allison was seized by a sudden fear that the explosion would create a lightning effect and pump electrocuting volts into the microphone he gripped. At minus one second, he dropped the microphone and screamed as loud as h e could: “Zero!” In that instant, a final surge of high voltage engulfed the firing unit, and the signals from McKibben and Titterton charged across the desert to galvanize the detonators on the bomb.
Fermi and the others heard Allison’s last scream. Then silence for what seemed an enternity. And in that millisecond, only the toads spoke at Trinity.