ON JULY 16, 1945, a small article appeared in the Albuquerque Tribune: “An ammunition magazine, containing high-explosives and pyrotechnics, exploded early today in a remote area of the Alamogordo air base reservation, producing a brilliant flash and blast, which were reported to have been observed as far away as Gallup, 235 miles northwest.”
The story was a lie. At 5:30 that morning a group of scientists had initiated a new era in human history.
The saga had begun fifty years earlier. In 1895 the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a mysterious energy emanating from the glass walls of a cathode-ray tube. When he covered the tube with black paper, the rays still lit up a screen of fluorescing material. He passed his hand in front of the tube. A faint shadow formed on the screen. Within it, in darker outline, he could clearly discern the silhouette of his bones.
Röntgen’s report on what he called X-rays stunned the world of science. It suggested an entirely new direction for research—the investigation of a novel, undreamed-of form of energy. Discoveries came quickly. Searching for X-rays, the Frenchman Henri Becquerel found a similar form of energy radiating from uranium. In 1898 Marie Curie and her husband Pierre isolated the element radium, a much more potent source of what she called radioactivity.
At McGill University in Montreal a lanky New Zealand farm boy turned physicist named Ernest Rutherford teamed up with the English chemist Frederick Soddy to look into a curious phenomenon that Rutherford had noticed during his own research into radioactivity. He had detected an unusual “emanation” from the radioactive element thorium. Soddy analyzed the gas and found it to be a different element altogether—argon.
Rutherford and Soddy posited an impossibility. An atom, by definition, could not be divided. Yet with radioactive emissions, elements were altering into entirely new materials by giving up part of their substance.
“Rutherford, this is transmutation!” Soddy exclaimed.
“Don’t call it transmutation,” Rutherford shot back. “They’ll have our heads off as alchemists.”
Transmutation it was, the metamorphosis of matter that, over a span of two millennia, countless alchemists and amateurs had devoted lifetimes to seeking. Just as astounding, the two scientists asserted in a 1903 paper, was the amount of energy involved in the process, which had to be “at least twenty-thousand times, and may be a million times, as great as the energy of any molecular change.”
We can only imagine the emotions felt by the Chinese alchemists who created the first chemical explosion on earth. Perhaps they were similar to Soddy’s feelings.
“I was overwhelmed with something greater than joy,” he said. “I cannot very well express it—a kind of exaltation.”
Soddy speculated that the energy contained inside the atom, if it could be tapped, could one day “make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden.” He also envisioned a darker side to the discovery. Back in England, lecturing to the Corps of Royal Engineers, he discussed the possibility that someone could develop a “weapon by which he could destroy the earth.”
In another of the ironic echoes that are the grace notes of history, radioactivity during the early twentieth century assumed a role as an elixir of life reminiscent of the potions prescribed for the emperors of medieval China. Physicians raced to try out cures based on the amazing new energy. They were encouraged when they found that it reduced some skin cancers and that the waters of many of the world’s famous spas were mildly radioactive. Was it possible that the invisible rays stimulated the body toward health? “Old Age May be Stayed by Radium” a newspaper proclaimed. Radioactive patent medicines proliferated—they proved as toxic as the elixirs of the alchemists.
It remained for a man of imagination to limn the true nature of the new form of energy. In 1914, H. G. Wells published a prophetic novel entitled The World Set Free. “The history of mankind,” it began, “is the history of the attainment of external power.” A quarter century before scientists split the atom, Wells foresaw a form of “atomic disintegration” that would unleash limitless power. The result would be no smiling Eden, but cities shattered by the “unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs.”
As dawn broke on that summer day in 1945, there appeared on earth something whose arrival was truly commensurate with the advent of gunpowder. The blast, referred to by the code name “Trinity,” produced light stronger than any that had ever shone on earth, heat 10,000 times the temperature of the sun’s surface, a force 20 million times greater than that of a high explosive. Like gunpowder, the atomic bomb would have a profound and unexpected impact on the nature of warfare. Like gunpowder, it would prove difficult to tame for peaceful uses and would elicit references to supernatural forces. Like gunpowder, it would bring a new form of terror into the world. Like gunpowder, it would awe its very creators.
“Naturally, we were very jubilant over the outcome of the experiment,” remembered Isidor Rabi, one of the scientists who watched the bomb explode. “Then, there was a chill, which was not the morning cold.”