When The Sky Melted—A Test Called Trinity

 

The now familiar mushroom cloud began to rise seconds after the detonation of the test device in the New Mexico desert. 

They called it the Trinity Test.  To General Leslie Groves, the Army Engineer in overall charge of the Manhattan Project, the name was useful because it was so “generic” that should enemy intelligence services catch wind of it there would be no clue as to what was actually taking place.  But the chief scientist overseeing the operation J. Robert Oppenheimer picked the name for a more poetic reason.  The secularized Jew was inspired in some way by the mystical poetry of John Donne particularly the line “Batter my heart, three person’d God.”  Perhaps it also represented an imponderable mystery.  

Eighty years ago today at exactly 5:29:45 AM on July 16, 1945 at a secret desert test site at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico the first Atomic Bomb in history was detonated.  In an instant the world changed forever.

The Manhattan Project has been described as the largest and most complex engineering and industrial undertaking in the history of the world to that point.  It was set off by a personal, somewhat anguished, letter by Albert Einstein, who considered himself a pacifist, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt making clear his belief that atomic weapons were not only feasible but would inevitably be built.  Intelligence indicated that Nazi scientists were at work on it in Germany.

 

Major General Leslie R. Groves of the Corps of Engineers commanded the Manhattan Project. 

The Manhattan Project under General Groves got under way in 1942.  The race was on.  Installations in support of the project soon spread across the continent. Basic research and development was conducted by Enrico Fermi and others at the University of Chicago and at the Argonne National Laboratories. Weapons development at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico was fed by other facilities, including Oak Ridge, Tennessee where uranium-235 was separated. Critical separation and production of plutonium-239 was done at the first large scale atomic reactor built at Hanford, Washington. 

The latter was particularly important because the cyclotrons were unable to produce enough pure plutonium to build more than one theoretically simple gun assembly type bomb.  The presence of trace amounts of plutonium-240 in the Hanford product was a challenge to designers because it undergoes spontaneous fission at an appreciable rate, and that releases excess thermal neutrons that could cause a devise to fizzle—incompletely detonate and release unconsumed plutonium.  Teams were working on various approaches to the problem.  In the end it was decided not to test the gun assembly bomb before deployment.  Scientists were confident it would work and there was an extremely limited supply of pure plutonium. 

The Trinity test involved an implosion assembly device nick named The Gadget.  A small spherical plutonium core was surrounded by nearly nine tons of high explosives, detonated simultaneously at many points around the periphery of the bomb, causing a lensing effect that focused more and more explosive force towards the plutonium core. The force of the explosions would reduce the diameter of this plutonium core increasing its density to produce a critical mass of plutonium leading to an atomic detonation.  There was a great deal of uncertainty about whether this would work, hence the test. 

Scientists and engineers set up a betting pool on the possible results of the test.   Choices ranged from a complete dud through the destruction of all of New Mexico, to a doomsday event—the ignition of the atmosphere and incineration of the planet. 

 

                Robert Oppenheimer--a scientist with the soul of a poet would be tormented by his creation and persecuted by the government he had served. 

The device was hoisted to the top of a 100 foot tall steel tower to mimic the air detonation of a bomb dropped from an aircraft.  Two bunkers were set up to observe the test. Oppenheimer and other scientists occupied the bunker closest to the detonation site, about ten miles away.  General Groves and others watched from the second 17 miles away.  The test was originally set to go off at 4 am but thunder showers pushed that back an hour.

When it went off, the blast exploded with energy to around 20 kilotons of TNT.  The flash illuminated the dark desert as if it were daylight and could be seen for hundreds of miles.  It took the powerful blast traveling at the speed of sound about 40 seconds to shake the first observation bunker and could eventually be felt over a hundred miles away.  In seconds a giant, and now familiar, mushroom cloud was growing which eventually reached a height of 7.2 miles in the atmosphere.  The blast crater was 10 feet deep and 1,100 feet wide and turned the desert sand into radioactive glass. 

                     Robert Oppenheimer and General Groves examine ground zero after the test.

 The test was a success.  General Groves informed President Harry Truman who would soon authorize the use of atomic weapons against Japan.  On August 6 the untested gun assembly bomb, Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima.  It worked.  Three days later Fat Man, based on the Trinity test design, was ignited over Nagasaki. 

 

The ruins of a temple in Nagasaki after the city was destroyed by a bomb based on the design tested at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico. 

Sometime after the original test Oppenheimer wrote that it reminded him of line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavd Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

 

The story of Oppenheimer and the test was retold in the 2023 Academy Award winning film, Oppenheimer.  Directed by Christopher Nolan it starred Cillian Murphy in the title role, Emily Blunt as the scientist’s wife, Matt Damon  as General Leslie Groves, and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss.

 

When Helen Keller Ended Up on J. Edgar Hoover’s Commie List

  

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover testifying before Congress about the "Communist Fifth Column."

Note—Attacks on “enemies of the people” and suggestions that folks should be thrown in jail for protests or simply overt opposition to the Cheeto-in-Charge as well as suggestions that reporters, activist actors, and even members of Congress be physically attacked by “patriots” bring to mind an earlier dark era for American liberties.  So do suggestions to declare a National Emergency and suspend habeas corpus. May we learn from the past.

On June 9, 1949 J. Edgar Hoover did his part to fuel the growing anti-Communist hysteria sweeping post-World War II America when he released a “confidential” FBI report that named scores of influential Americans, most of them in the movie and entertainment business as members of the Communist Party. 

Hoover had developed his list after Attorney General Tom Clark in 1946 asked for the names of potentially “disloyal Americans” who might be detained in event of a “national emergency.”  The names on the list were included a year later in 1950 after the Korean War broke  out in a report to President Harry Truman with more than 12,000 who should be rounded up and detained after the formal suspension of the right of habeas corpus.  Truman had the good sense to thank his powerful FBI boss and promptly put the report and recommendation in the bottom drawer never to be acted upon.

But there were plenty, many of the in Congress and including some of the country’s most powerful media barons like the Chicago Tribune’s Col. Robert R. McCormack and Time’s Henry Luce were already clamoring for just such draconian measures.

Hollywood where the major studios were run by Jews and where many actors, writers, and creative people were politically active liberals and leftists and where there was a powerful labor union movement with sometimes radical leadership, had already been singled out as a virtual Commie fifth column. 

In 1946 and ’47 the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee launched high profile hearings on Communist infiltration of the film industry and subpoenaed hundreds to testify and name names.  Nineteen of those refused to do so and were named as unfriendly witnesses.  Eleven of those were called before the committee and 10 refused to answer questions.  Only German émigré Berthold Brecht relented and testified.  The others including screen writers Dalton Trumbo, Howard Koch, and Ring Larder, Jr. were indicted for contempt of Congress and eventually sent to prison and blacklisted from the industry.

 

Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart lead a delegation at the Capitol of the Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights to protest the persecution of the Hollywood 10.  Easily identifiable are Danny Kaye behind Bogart, June Haver behind Bacall, William Holden and Richard Conti. Studio executive forced the committee to back down and some participants were themselves black listed.

Some of Hollywood royalty including John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Garfield, Danny Kaye, and Billy Wilder attempted to rally support for the Hollywood Ten by organizing a Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights and traveling to Washington to protest.  They came under intense attack by the Committee, the press, and by the terrified studio owners.  Bogart, spearhead and principle spokesman for the group, was forced to back track and issue a statement that the trip had been ill advised.  The group broke up acrimoniously between those who thought they should have toughed it out and those like Wilder who advised it was time “to fold our tents.”

Two years later Garfield and Kaye were among those named in the new FBI report, which was based on unnamed confidential informants and the Bureau’s own “analysis” which concluded that the Communists claimed, “to have been successful in using well-known Hollywood personalities to further Communist Party aims.”  Analysis was often based on no more than the recollection of an informant seeing an individual at a meeting years earlier, attendance at public functions, donations to certain charities, or signatures on some petitions.  It included pre-war support for anti-Fascist causes and war time support of the Soviet Union—including activities undertaken at the request of the government.

Some people on the list were or had been Party Members.  Others were sympathetic.  Some were non-Communist leftists—members of the Socialist Party or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  Many were unionists or sympathizers with the early Civil Rights Movement.  And very many were simply liberals.  It made no difference.  To Hoover all were not just the “willing dupes” of the HUAC hearings, but active, card carrying Communists.

 

Among those listed were acknowledged Socialist and IWW member Helen Keller, even then widely regarded as a sort of secular saint.  The report centered on the activities of Fredric March, a well-known liberal and an active Democrat who had recently won his second Academy Award for the brilliant film about the return of World War II GIs, The Best Years of Our Lives.  March was no Communist, but he had organized a group concerned about atomic weapons and critical of America’s growing arsenal.  Any one even tangentially connected to that effort, or to people connected to the effort were caught up in rippling waves of innuendo.

John Garfield, once the brightest new star at Warner Bros. came under especially severe scrutiny and his career immediately suffered.  Already plagued with heart problems, the stress of the accusations was widely believed to be a direct contributing factor to his death of a heart attack in May of 1952. 

Other prominent people named in the report, along with hundreds of non-celebrities included writer and wit Dorothy Parker, Paul Muni, and Edward G. Robinson.  Like Garfield and Kaye they were all Jewish.  In fact the reek of Anti-Semitism hung over the whole report.

 

 Fredric March, Paulette Goddard, Edward G. Robinson, and Audie Murphy, America's most decorated World War II soldier, stood up to Hoover.

The effect on careers varied.  Many of the more obscure found themselves on blacklists.  Parker lost the radio panel show jobs that had provided most of her income.  Muni’s film career was essentially finished.  March and Kaye were able to keep working and had some of their best work ahead of them.  Robinson’s career was hurt, but not over.  And he was the most outspokenly defiant befitting his tough guy image.

These rantings, ravings, accusations, smearing, and character assassinations can only emanate from sick, diseased minds of people who rush to the press with indictments of good American citizens. I have played many parts in my life, but no part have I played better or been more proud of than that of being an American citizen.