The Devil of the Desert ― The Manhattan Project

On a highland in New Mexico, the town appeared all at once. It was on no map, and its address was nothing but a post-office box number. The scientists who headed there could not tell even their families where they were going, and at times are said to have lived even concealing their real names. Los Alamos, the secret town floating between desert and sky, was the place where humanity first deliberately set out to turn the ‘fire of the sun’ into a weapon.

Last time, we followed how uranium split within the laboratory and the true nature of the force that makes stars shine came into view. Yet that discovery, under the colossal pressure of war, could no longer remain pure inquiry. America threw the full strength of the nation into developing the atomic bomb on a scale never seen before. The code name was the Manhattan Project. Let us step inside that project, hidden away in the desert.

The nation moved ― the birth of a colossal project

For a single discovery to become a weapon, the genius of the laboratory alone fell far short. To extract bomb-grade material from uranium, vast factories and staggering quantities of electricity and resources were required. It was something beyond the hands of any one scientist—an undertaking that could not be realized unless the nation itself moved. In 1942, America placed this project under military control and began to drive it forward in earnest.

The man chosen to bind the whole project together was the army officer Leslie Groves. He was a practical man with experience overseeing colossal construction projects, and with a manner some called overbearing, he set about gathering together materials, people, and secrets. The project would eventually swell to a scale without precedent for its time, holding numerous vast facilities and hundreds of thousands of personnel. Many of those who worked there were not even told what they were making.

For Groves, the hard problem was where, and under whom, to gather those minds. To isolate scientists scattered across the country in one place, to let them argue with one another while letting nothing leak outside. The place chosen to satisfy that contradictory demand was the remote highland of New Mexico, Los Alamos. And then a figure was chosen to be entrusted with overall command of the science.

Oppenheimer ― the intellect who led the desert

The man named to head the scientific division was the theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Until then he had little experience leading a large organization, and there were said to be voices that viewed his left-leaning associations with suspicion. Even so, Groves chose to entrust the very heart of the project to this delicate and erudite physicist. An intellect versed even in literature and Eastern thought was placed at the core of a military project.

Renowned scientists gathered to Oppenheimer from around the world. Among them were not a few who had fled Europe to escape the Nazis and the flames of war. Ironically, minds that had escaped the German threat were drawn to the desert town in order to build a weapon to counter that very same threat. They lived with their families in an isolated town, and as they waged debates before the blackboard, they gave shape to an unknown device.

The development proceeded along two paths in parallel. One was a method using uranium, the other a method using a different material called plutonium. To detonate plutonium in particular required a difficult technique called ‘implosion,’ crushing the material into a sphere in an instant, and the scientists struggled over and over between theory and experiment. Would it truly explode after all? To answer that question, which no one had ever confirmed, an experiment in the desert was planned.

Trinity ― the first fire lights up the desert

In the predawn of July 16, 1945, in a corner of the New Mexico desert, the first nuclear explosion test in human history is said to have been carried out. The code name was Trinity. The prototype plutonium-type bomb set atop a steel tower was called ‘the Gadget’ by those involved. Could the fire of the stars be deliberately kindled on the ground—the answer to years of toil was staked on these few seconds before dawn.

The scientists in the shelters were listening to the countdown amid the tension. Before long a flash ran out, and for an instant the desert is said to have been lit brighter than high noon. Heat and shock pressed in with a delay, and a vast mushroom cloud rose into the sky. The test succeeded, and the device is said to have released power equivalent to some tens of thousands of tons of TNT. Humanity had, by its own hand, made a fragment of the sun appear on the ground.

In that moment, what passed through the scientists’ hearts was not uniform. There was the elation of years of toil rewarded, there was relief, and at the same time there was an immeasurable dread. Oppenheimer is said to have recounted that, before this sight, he recalled a passage from an ancient Indian scripture—now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. That complex feeling, in which joy and shuddering were mixed inseparably, may have been the honest face of a human being standing at the entrance to the nuclear age.

By the time Trinity’s flash lit up the desert, the war in Europe was already over. Nazi Germany, the original motive, had by this time already surrendered. Even so, the project did not stop, and the newly completed bomb was turned toward the war still continuing across the Pacific. The fire kindled in the desert was still an event within the test site. Yet a mere few weeks later, that fire would be unleashed above the towns where people lived. August 1945—a summer the world would never be able to forget was drawing very near.