Shortly before five thirty a.m., the countdown began. The seconds were the longest of Robert’s life.
The team had nicknamed the device the Gadget. It was the product of half a decade of work by some of the greatest scientific minds ever assembled. That morning, the Gadget sat atop a one-hundred-foot-tall steel tower. Desert stretched in every direction. The control station where the scientists waited was nearly six miles away. Even at that distance, Robert donned welder’s goggles and focused through the tinted glass. He saw only darkness in the seconds before the countdown reached zero.
The flash of white light came first. It lasted for a few seconds, then a wave of heat passed through him, soaking his face and hands. When the wall of light faded, he could make out a column of fire rising from the site, expanding quickly.
The cloud broke through a temperature inversion at seventeen thousand feet—which most scientists had thought impossible. For minutes after the explosion, the cloud rose into the sky, reaching the substratosphere at over thirty-five thousand feet.
Forty seconds after the detonation, the shock wave reached the scientists in the control station. The sound of the blast followed shortly after. It had the quality of distant thunder, reverberating off the nearby hills for several seconds, giving the impression of a rolling thunderstorm. The sound was heard up to a hundred miles away; the light from the explosion was seen from almost twice as far.
The blast instantly vaporized the steel tower that held the bomb, leaving a crater nearly half a mile wide in its place. An iron pipe set in concrete, four inches in diameter, sixteen feet tall, and fifteen hundred feet away from the detonation, was also vaporized. In the control station, there was silence. In place of the worry that had led up to the event, every person who had seen it now felt awe. And uncertainty.
As if coming out of a trance, the team members looked around, unsure what to do. Some shook hands, congratulating each other. A few people laughed. Several cried. All believed that in the New Mexico desert that morning, the world had changed forever.
The first atomic bomb had been detonated. They hoped it would be the last.
Back at Los Alamos, a team member raised a glass. “To the dawn of the Atomic Age.”
Many had feared the test would be a dud. The feeling most of them now felt was relief; for a few it was fear.
Robert spoke for the first time since the Trinity test. “Yes, a new age indeed. We have given the human race something it has never possessed before: the means with which to destroy itself.”
When no one responded, he added, “How long will it be before a madman acquires our device and uses it? Five years? Ten? A hundred? I wonder which will be the last generation of humans? Our children, perhaps our grandchildren?”
When the group broke, Robert’s supervisor followed him back to his office and closed the door behind him. Robert had come to respect and trust the older man, and so the words he said gave him great pause.
“Did you mean what you said?”
“Every word. We’ve opened Pandora’s box.”
His supervisor studied him a moment. “Be careful what you say, Robert. Some people here aren’t what they seem.”
Less than a month later, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki.
Death toll estimates ranged from 129,000 to 246,000.
The depression Robert had fought his entire life finally overwhelmed him. When he stopped coming to work, his supervisor visited him at his home.
“Did you know?” Robert asked.
“Not the specifics. Only that the bombs would be used to end the war.”
“We killed those people.”
“The war would have dragged on for years.”
Robert shook his head. “We should have dropped it just outside Tokyo, where the emperor and the residents could see it, then blanketed the city with leaflets demanding they surrender or overthrow their government.”
“Toppling governments is a messy proposition—and unpredictable. Besides, Tokyo has been firebombed far worse than the damage that would have resulted from an atomic bomb outside the city. During two days in March alone, we burned sixteen square miles of it.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that the decision, no matter what you think of it, was not yours to make. You feel blame. You shouldn’t. It was war. You did your job.”
“Perhaps. But I can’t help feeling as though nothing matters anymore. I know now that the project gave me something I needed: purpose—and belief in what I was creating. Yet having seen the horror of it, I know now that I was a fool. The die is cast. Our extinction is merely a matter of time.”
The older man sat quietly for a moment.
“What if I told you there was a group of scientists and intellectuals, people like ourselves, from around the world, who believed as you do—that humanity has now become a danger to itself? What if I told you that this group was working on a sort of second Manhattan Project, a technology that might one day save the entire human race? This device would be controlled by the people who built it, intellectuals with only the common good in mind, not nationalism, or religion, or money.”
“If… such a group existed, I would be very interested in hearing more.”
Several months later, the two men traveled to London. They were shocked at the state of the city. The war, and in particular the Blitz, had leveled entire sections; others lay in ruins. But the endless attacks had not broken the British. And now they were rebuilding.
At one a.m., a car took the men to a private club. They made their way up the grand staircase and into a ballroom, where a lectern stood before rows of chairs. Signs emblazoned with three words hung above the stage: Reason, Ethics, and Physics. The attendees filed in silently and faced forward. Robert estimated that there were sixty people in the room.
What that speaker said that night changed Robert’s life forever.