Pitted against them, a hand-picked group of scientists
worked feverishly together to win the race to be the first to build
an atomic bomb.
It would take 1,000 days to develop the weapon that finally
brought an end to the war.
Told by the men and women who lived through them, this is their story.
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
Vishnu...
..is trying to persuade the prince that...
he should do his duty, and to impress him,
takes on his multi-armed form
and says,
"Now I am become death,
"the destroyer of worlds."
I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
It was an amazing time,
and it really is an amazing story that you have the best
scientists of their generation, experimentalists
and theorists, all collected in one place in this secret
laboratory on top of Desert Mesa, dedicated to doing one thing,
to building a weapon that will be decisive in winning the war.
If you wrote this as a novel, you couldn't do any better.
Mankind had harnessed the essential power of the universe -
nuclear fission.
But how would we use it?
Politicians and the men fighting the war wanted the ultimate weapon
as fast as it could be produced.
But only the scientists truly understood the danger
and power soon to be unleashed.
The Allies knew the Germans were already working on a bomb,
and that Hitler wouldn't hesitate to use it.
It really is true that the people of Los Alamos were
motivated by fear that Hitler was going to get the bomb first.
Well, you can say it's fear.
Concern.
Legitimate concern.
They were the leaders in that field of research.
I do not believe that people today
realise how tremendous
those dangers had been.
Because Hitler indeed could have taken over the world.
Yes, there was a fear that it might not...
Forces of good might not prevail.
It just lent a sense of urgency to what we were trying to do.
Things were not going very well in the Pacific.
We weren't really geared up at the beginning for this type of action.
In the early days of World War II, there was no country in the world
better poised to build a nuclear weapon than Hitler's Germany.
Germany seemed unstoppable, yet all was not lost.
Thanks to Albert Einstein's breakthrough,
quantum leaps were being made,
and the awesome power at the core of an atom was now under man's control.
I suppose it all goes back maybe to Einstein.
We had the famous equation E = mc2.
..Very small amount of mass may be converted
into a very large amount of energy.
And they located that uranium would be the mass
that could turn into an enormous amount of energy.
The scientists understood only too well
the threat the Nazis represented.
Remember, many of these scientists had come from Europe
and had studied with the best scientists in the world, which at
that point were in Germany - people like Werner Heisenberg and others.
After Hitler came to power and drove many of them to American shores,
they feared what was going on back in Europe,
and I think this initial fear was real, and it was an obsession.
Many top physicists had fled Germany,
but some of the field's best and brightest were still working there,
including the brilliant Werner Heisenberg.
Dr Leo Szilard was one of the refugees.
In 1933, he had been the first to theorise a nuclear chain reaction.
He knew the Germans were working on a bomb, and drafted a letter
to President Roosevelt, warning him of the project.
He took it to Einstein, who signed the letter and sent it off.
A concerned Roosevelt responded,
"What you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up.
"This requires action."
The action he demanded came to be known as the Manhattan Project.
The war in Europe raged on.
Then on December the 7th, 1941,
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
No matter how long it may take us
to overcome this premeditated invasion,
the American people in their righteous might
will win through to absolute victory.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
The whole country was united.
I had lost a lot of friends during the early parts of the war.
High school friends, college friends.
Most of them in the Pacific.
The war was not going well.
Britain was just hanging on by a thread,
and we didn't have very much that we could do in the way of help.
I think there was really a sense that we might not make it.
Anything that they could do to bring an end to that slaughter,
even with a terrible weapon, would be to the good.
So we had a real objective to end the war,
any way we could.
On January the 9th, 1942,
President Roosevelt officially authorised the project.
Its mission, to build a bomb that would end the war.
And so they choose Army Corps of Engineers,
because this is going to be on an industrial scale
instead of a university laboratory, which is where it was at the time
and to hide it from Congress,
they didn't want Congress snooping around here.
Congress tried every way on earth to get in here,
and the other laboratories.
Groves kept them out completely.
The man chosen to lead the project
was a hard-nosed West Point graduate,
Leslie Groves.
As head of the Manhattan district during the war,
I was responsible for the development of the atomic bomb.
General Groves was chosen to head the Manhattan Project
in September of 1942.
He was well prepared to do so, having been in charge
of all Army mobilisation for the run up to World War II.
Groves wasted no time ramping the Manhattan Project up to full speed.
Soon after getting the job, in the first day or two,
he goes to the Office of War Production,
to the head of it, a guy named Nelson,
with a letter to himself,
only needing Nelson's signature.
And the letter directs Nelson to give Groves anything he needed.
Nelson is shocked by this.
At this point Groves is still a Colonel, and Nelson says, "Well, I can't do that."
And Groves says,
"Well, I guess I'm going to have to tell President Roosevelt."
Nelson is shocked at this threat,
and says, "OK, I'll sign the letter."
Lacking the authority he needed to wield,
Colonel Groves lobbied for promotion to General.
Knew Groves quite well,
probably better than almost anybody at Los Alamos.
You could not have gotten anyone who could've pushed that project through faster.
He was very, very good about that,
I mean, he was as simple, if in our cases we wanted...
Initially we wanted one B-29.
He got us a B-29 when they weren't being produced,
we got one of the first ones off the line.
Perhaps Groves' most inspired decision
was appointing J Robert Oppenheimer
Scientific Director of the Manhattan Project.
We've got two cultures here, we've got the culture of the military
and we've got the culture of science.
One is closed and classified, one is open and declassified.
But here he meets Oppenheimer,
and he sees that Oppenheimer thinks like him.
He was a brilliant fellow.
Groves could learn from other scientists
that he was really very good. I mean, he not only
sounded brilliant, but he also had the physics to back it up.
And I think he recognised the qualities of a leader,
which he had.
Oppenheimer - "Oppy" to those who knew him -
was a controversial choice.
Oppenheimer is someone who hasn't won a Nobel Prize.
Others thought that he was not a good candidate for this job.
Luis Alvarez, another physicist,
said that this is a man who couldn't run a hot dog stand,
and yet he's going to run the most complex, technically complex
and arguably most important project for the war effort.
He could be somewhat arrogant at times.
I mean, some people were bothered by this.
I was surprised and pleased.
Oppenheimer was a difficult human being,
but this was not so at Los Alamos.
He was extremely intelligent, extremely quick.
He was much too quick for me.
I think it's still not quite understood what Groves saw in Oppenheimer,
but I think you have to say that Gross was an excellent
judge of character and of talent.
I think Oppenheimer's real contribution
was in managing all these er...
prima donna chairman of physics departments,
chemistry departments throughout the country.
With a director in place, it was time to find somewhere to work.
A place where secrecy and security could be guaranteed.
When the project was first proposed,
all of the atomic work going on in the United States
was going on in universities like Berkeley and Chicago and MIT,
and Groves did not want a lot of communications going on
between the scientists, he didn't want those intercepted by the Nazis
and so he wanted to bring everybody together in one spot.
He did not want the laboratory to be on a coast
because he was afraid of naval bombardment or some sort of attack,
so he wanted to be in the centre of country and he wanted to be very isolated.
Robert Oppenheimer had grown up in New York City,
and he was never a particularly strong young man
and his family had millions, and so he and his brother Frank
were able to come out to the Desert Southwest, they were familiar with northern New Mexico,
and they just really fell in love with this area.
Well, in 1942, this plateau was picturesque. Idyllic.
There were 36 homesteads up here, so it was very sparsely populated.
After an extensive search of the landscape he loved,
Oppenheimer found the perfect place for the project...
Los Alamos.
Los Alamos itself was the site of a school for boys.
Basically, you get a high school education,
but it's kind of like the boy scouts.
They issue you a rifle, a horse and that's pretty much it.
They wore shorts year round,
and it gets pretty cold up here in Los Alamos in the winter.
They slept year round, outside in a screened-in porch, Fuller Lodge,
and so the idea was to also toughen the boys up,
that's what was going on here.
And suddenly in 1942 and '43, Army bulldozers come in,
they start ploughing down the trees, they start moving dirt.
The Army puts up buildings just as fast as they can.
And in a matter of months, in the opening months of 1943,
they created the wartime laboratory here in Los Alamos.
The Manhattan Project was moving swiftly forward.
Hundreds of scientists and workers
were installed in labs across the country.
It works on paper.
It became Oppenheimer's task to recruit the scientists
to come to this isolated place in New Mexico
and help him build erm...a bomb.
Groves and Oppenheimer originally thought they would have
probably about 30 scientists, maybe 100 support personnel on the project.
But it grew and grew and grew...
And they ended up with over 6,000 people working on it by the end.
Oppenheimer dubbed this collection of brilliant scientists
his luminaries.
At times there were up to six Nobel Prize winners working on the project.
The scientists that I've talked to
were amazed at the array of famous, Nobel-winning, amazing scientists.
And when you talked, like, to the SEDs who sometimes worked with them
they were saying, "Oh, my God, you know, I'm 19
"and Richard Feynman is asking me questions,
"or Edward Teller tells me I'm wrong."
Edward Teller had joined the Manhattan Project
from the beginning, but was annoyed at being passed over
for the directorship of the theoretical division.
A lot of these scientists were very difficult personalities
and this was recognised early on, by both Groves and Oppenheimer.
And Teller was probably the most difficult of them all.
Edward Teller was a Hungarian, another emigre who had studied
with Heisenberg, who was an irascible character.
Fermi told me a long time ago
that of all the people on the project,
he thought Teller was the smartest.
I said, "Yeah, I find that very hard because
"Edward has been so controversial",
and their personalities were so different.
You know, a Hungarian and an Italian, just so different,
but Fermi's favourite,
authenticated by his daughter and by his telling me, was Teller.
He was the premier theoretician as far as he was concerned,
so he was going to deal with bigger issues.
So he refused to do the calculations,
they were assigned to him by Oppenheimer, he refused to do them.
Ultimately, because they were critical
to the working of the implosion bomb,
those calculations were given to the British mission
of scientists at Los Alamos, including Klaus Fuchs.
So it was Klaus Fuchs, who turned out to be a Soviet agent,
who actually did the theory of implosion calculations,
and of course he passed that information on to the Soviet Union.
When Edward came here I think he had the expectation
that he would be the leader of the Theoretical Physics Division,
and Oppenheimer...
had another choice.
Hans Bethe.
Hans Bethe was one of the first recruits.
Born in Germany, he'd fled his home country in 1935.
From very early on,
Jews were...
..arrested and put in concentration camps.
That was very simple. I had a Jewish mother,
so I think there was no question that I should emigrate.
Bethe had been working on radar for the military,
a project he felt was of far more practical use
than working with a hastily assembled group on a nuclear bomb.
I thought it couldn't possibly work.
So, this was a waste of time.
But he had great respect for Oppenheimer.
I was simply curious,
so when he asked me to come, I came.
The work at Los Alamos was a race to beat the Germans to the bomb.
A race to win the war.
But Groves had no idea where he stood in that race.
Groves was particularly driven by the lack of information
that he had on access projects.
He was obsessed with finding out whether the Germans
had a programme, were working on a bomb, who the scientists were.
From the beginning of the Manhattan Project,
they had been trying to determine what the Germans were doing.
And they didn't have hardly any information to go on.
What were the Germans doing? We have to find out.
Were they building a bomb or not?
So Groves set about mining all the information they had
about whether or not the Germans might have a bomb,
and even set up some special missions
to attack and even assassinate
key German scientists,
the most famous of which was Werner Heisenberg.
And they gave him a man called Moe Berg, Morris Berg,
who happened to also be a professional baseball player,
you know, a catcher.
And Moe Berg was quite a character.
He was told, "We have a mission for you."
He was told by Groves to go to Europe and to track Heisenberg,
and if there's any indication
that he knows anything about a bomb programme, to kill him.
So, Berg is sent to Europe.
Heisenberg is given a...
special permission to leave Germany and go to Switzerland
and give a lecture, and in the audience is Moe Berg.
Heisenberg's right in front of him. He's got a gun in his pocket.
He also has cyanide pills to kill himself if it comes to that,
but again, this is wartime, this is a mission -
"I've signed up for it, this is what I do."
He's in the audience,
and Heisenberg doesn't give any indication
that he has anything to do with a bomb.
Later that night he gets invited to a dinner
in which Heisenberg is one of the members of the party,
and again
he gets no indication from Heisenberg
that there's a bomb programme at work.
He even gets to walk on the same street back to their quarters
where they're staying with Heisenberg.
So Heisenberg doesn't know this of course
but he escapes with his life
because Berg decides he doesn't know anything about a bomb.
So yes, Groves has not only a project to
maybe get rid of what is considered to be the top scientist,
but to bomb their laboratory in Berlin,
to go after them in other places
and has again the authority to tell the Air Force,
"I want you to bomb this section of Berlin.
"These are the laboratories of what might be a German bomb programme."
Air Force, done.
Finding out about Germany's progress was one thing,
but it was equally important to prevent any leak of information
from Los Alamos that might alert them to the Manhattan Project.
Secrecy was absolutely vital.
We could not tell our parents where we were,
which was very hard on them
because there were draft dodgers during those days,
and the neighbours whose sons were all in the military,
one way or the other, they'd ask my parents where I was,
and they honestly couldn't say.
So I think it was very hard on them.
You had limited communication with your family,
with your loved ones, with the outside world.
You were working under the pressure,
the immense, unceasing pressure of trying to get the job done.
It was an intense time, we all worked
I think it would be fair to say 60 hour weeks,
and we worked on Saturday by rule, so to speak, by routine.
Sunday was the only day off.
Anybody working under those kind of conditions
needs to blow off steam somehow.
Even though there was immense pressure to build the weapon,
and they went to six-day and I think even seven-day work weeks,
there was some time for recreation.
They could visit Santa Fe from time to time, under certain conditions,
and Groves, of course, had his spies out to ensure that these scientists,
if they visited the bar in Santa Fe, were not too talkative.
We were on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
But a group of us would get together,
save for a trip up to the Hot Spring, spend the day swimming.
Before we left here early in the morning,
we would make up a story
that everybody would use, as who we were and why we were there.
And no mention of Los Alamos.
The security was probably the most important thing that you were told
when you were there, at the outset -
that this was a very highly secret project
and you're not to talk to anybody,
including your own spouse, about what you're doing here.
One of the really difficult things about working in wartime Los Alamos
was that you were in a confined space and you had limited movement.
You couldn't just get up and go wherever you wanted.
You had to have permission.
There's a good chance that somebody might be watching you.
All the scientists were given fake names
and Fermi's name was Mr Farmer, I remember.
General Groves was very cautious about security,
and whenever, especially the upper-level scientists
left the hill, then they would have security guards with them,
Oppenheimer almost always had a bodyguard,
and the people from Los Alamos knew
wherever they went they were being followed,
and it was...it was just part of what you live with.
We weren't allowed phone calls coming in from outside.
If we got one they were to be transferred to er...
Dave Hawkin's office, who was the personnel department.
They couldn't get any mail in or out from where they really were,
so everybody had the same address, Box 1663.
Certain places, like Sears Roebuck, wondered who was living on Box 1663
since they got, you know, 100 catalogues from Sears and Roebuck.
Somebody was reading your mail,
and if there was something in there that shouldn't be in there,
it was sent back to you, for YOU to figure out
what belonged and what didn't belong.
Richard Feynman had sort of a unique situation.
His wife had tuberculosis,
and she was at a sanatorium in Albuquerque
and so they would write letters to each other, and they had
a pet thing that they did, that was they liked to write in code.
Well, the mail in Los Alamos was censored,
and the folks who were taking care of the censorship of the mail
were up in arms, they didn't know what to do about this code -
for all they knew Richard was telling these secrets
of Los Alamos to his ill wife in Albuquerque.
They finally worked out a deal where
whoever was writing the letter would include a key code for the censors,
and the censors had to throw that key code away,
so the recipient of the letter would be able to break the code.
Groves and the army security people were worried about the fact that
word was getting out that there was the secret facility,
the scientists would come in from the mesa, and...
So people in Santa Fe knew that there was something going on
at Los Alamos.
One of the rumours that actually had some basis in fact
was that it was a base for pregnant WACs,
members of the Women's Army Corps.
There were stories, such as...
it was a...
repair centre for submarines.
But Dr Oppenheimer got very concerned about all these rumours in Santa Fe.
So the scientists were sent into the bar at La Fonda to...
to sort of tell false stories, to spread disinformation.
He called in Charlotte Serber, who was the librarian,
and Robert Serber, and said, "I want you all to go down to Santa Fe.
"I want you to go to La Fonda,
"pretend to get drunk and I want you to spread a rumour."
One of the stories they were supposed to tell
is that they were working on electric rockets.
"Oh, you know what they're doing in Los Alamos?
"They're making rockets up there!"
And Charlotte would dance with somebody or sit at the bar with somebody,
and, you know, they wanted to talk about their cow,
or their ranch, or their different problems,
they didn't really care what was going on in Los Alamos.
Oppenheimer's leadership was critical.
He knew that keeping his team happy was essential
if they were to succeed.
He did his utmost to create a normal working environment.
Groves and the Army did their best to supply whatever was needed
to keep some semblance of normal life...
in place.
We tried to make it normal. Well, it wasn't normal.
We're way up there, and so there are a lot of things to do at this altitude
in this part of the country.
Scientists really enjoyed hiking.
Enrico Fermi in particular was a legendary hiker around here.
We had a scientist here,
his name was George Kistiakowsky.
He was the leader of our explosives division.
So George had all of this high-explosive Composition B laying around,
and it turns out that that's pretty good for clearing out trees.
And so our first ski run was created by George Kistiakowsky
and his high explosives.
Hans Bethe, I think, was the key figure,
he got the Army to put a donkey engine on top of the hill there
and they fixed it up with a rope so they had a rope tow.
Sundays we went on picnics, went to the mountains,
went to the Indian Pueblo, went to the ruins,
sometimes went even to Santa Fe if we could afford the gas.
Many of the scientists and their families enjoyed riding horses.
Dotty's house was pretty
and so she would offer her house for weddings and for parties.
One of the nice things about World War II Los Alamos
for the scientists is that they could...if they were married,
they could bring their wife, bring their family to the site.
Women in Los Alamos had many roles.
There were obviously stay-at-home moms, there were women scientists who were up here.
So many of the women also served as teachers,
and they worked in the schools, which were being built at the time.
And then there were a lot of jobs that were
created at the laboratory that women did.
Of course there were secretarial jobs, there were
Women's Army Corps people who were here as telephone operators.
There were many women who worked as "computors", that was their title.
They were known as computors themselves.
They had big adding machines
and they were crunching the numbers for the mathematics
that would create the engineering that would create the bombs,
because there were no computers at the time to do this,
and so it was actually human computers, was what the women were.
There was an expression, I think, during the war, that "they also serve who only stand and wait".
And there was a lot of standing and waiting
if you were a wife of one of the scientists at Los Alamos.
Groves and his staff had planned for everything the community needed
to sustain itself and work efficiently.
But there was one thing he hadn't planned for. A baby boom.
One of their favourite activities was having babies.
There was a huge population of kids.
It was a dollar to have a baby and almost everybody had a baby.
Groves was not too happy at the number of babies
that were born at Los Alamos.
Groves was concerned about the business
of having to provide more and more housing.
Groves actually told Oppenheimer
that he wanted the scientists to have fewer children.
Of course this was pretty tough for Oppenheimer to do, considering
that Kitty Oppenheimer, his wife, was pregnant with a child at the time!
So he really didn't have much moral authority to speak on the issue.
Even a brothel appeared.
Amazingly, Colonel Groves looked the other way.
At Los Alamos, the WACs set up a little business for the men,
and they were doing pretty well in their little business enterprise,
and General Groves...
They found out about it and then they said, "Look...pfft...
"Just... We're just maybe going to look the other way and, you know,
"try to keep it...a little... less visible."
The work at Los Alamos was incredibly dangerous.
Dr Harry Daghlian fatally irradiated himself
whilst performing a critical-mass experiment.
It was just one of the many accidents
that took the lives of pioneering Los Alamos scientists
working on the bomb.
There were a lot of potential hazards,
and so, while they were aware of the hazards, they were still learning
the nature of how significant some of these hazards would be.
A physicist named Harry Daghlian
wanted to do a criticality experiment.
He went down to one of our facilities.
It was later in the evening,
he was by himself, to do the experiment at least,
and what he did was he took some plutonium
and he started stacking these tungsten carbide bricks around it.
And so with every tungsten carbide brick
that he would place around it, it would contain more neutrons.
So, with every brick, you're getting closer to going prompt critical.
He comes down to his last brick, drops it, lands on the pile.
It's enough to contain enough neutrons for it to go prompt critical
and he instantly receives a fatal dose of radiation.
And it was really a terrible way to die,
because what happens is, over the course of several days,
10 to 20 days, your body just breaks down completely.
There was the unfortunate Slotin accident.
Louis Slotin, who was demonstrating how you could bring
two pieces of plutonium together.
It was a sphere, and so you had to keep the two hemispheres apart.
If they came together it would contain enough neutrons,
again, to go prompt critical.
The way that they kept the hemispheres apart
was with a screwdriver.
And so Louis Slotin was holding a screwdriver between the hemispheres,
the screwdriver slipped,
the hemispheres came together and it went prompt critical.
And there was a burst of radiation that was fatal to Slotin and...
and others in the room.
I remember they had gotten lead foil to put in his mouth because
the gold of his...in his teeth, the fillings were radioactive.
You know, you got glimpses of what was going on, it was very sobering.
The danger extended beyond the science labs.
A lack of knowledge amongst security staff also resulted in deaths.
We had some soldiers.
They drank a substance thinking that it was...consumable alcohol.
Turned out that it was not, and they all three died
as a result of ingesting, er, whatever this was that they took.
The theory of the nuclear chain reaction
was well developed by this point.
The problem was now an engineering challenge.
How would the new bomb actually work?
Then disaster struck.
The Thin Man bomb design they had been working on was fatally flawed.
Probably the most serious problem
that they faced during the Manhattan Project
was the realisation, in 1944,
that maybe the plutonium
that was being made in reactors at Hanford, Washington,
would not work in the design, in the bomb design.
Disaster really struck because we found out that the plutonium
did have this isotope plutonium-240, and we couldn't use a gun.
And all the material we were going to get primarily,
in early days, was plutonium.
And just at the time this knowledge came to everybody's attention
and they realised that, "Wow, we have a serious, serious problem,"
a solution was at hand.
And that solution of course became what is known as implosion.
A visitor from outside who was present in the meeting,
namely Johnny Von Neumann, who pointed out that, in fact,
if you imploded them with sufficient symmetry
you could get a great increase in density,
which meant you could get along with using much, much less material.
Immediately the work shifted,
from the concept of using plutonium in a gun
to plutonium in what turned out to be an implosion
using high explosive.
And it was far from certain that the implosion bomb would work,
unless the detonators went off exactly right.
And so it was new and it was exciting and it was hard and it was...
you know, discovering things, but at the same time working
12 and 14 hours a day, trying to reach that goal.
Scientists, er, didn't obsess about, er...
the destructiveness of this thing,
of this thing they were building.
For a couple of reasons - one is that the war was going on, they
knew of the terrible casualties, certainly the war in the Pacific.
From what I knew about the war,
it sounded like things weren't really going that well.
There seemed no end to what was going on.
And the other aspect is,
they didn't really understand how terrible this weapon was yet.
It hadn't been tested, it was all theoretical.
Their standards of judgement, you know,
of comparable weapons were the two-ton blockbuster.
Well, the weapon they're building is not a blockbuster,
it's a city-buster.
General Groves was pressing for a test.
The war in Europe was over and he wanted to have the weapon available
before the end of the Potsdam Conference.
And Groves set about where we're going to do it
and they found a place in New Mexico, in the desert.
And they called it the Trinity Site.
Groves began preparations
for the world's first ever test of a nuclear weapon.
But would it work?
Simultaneously, Harry Truman is in Potsdam, Germany,
with his counterparts, Churchill and Stalin.
News of this success or failure is going to have an impact.
The pressure in the days leading up to the Trinity test took its toll.
Oppenheimer was sickly and exhausted,
and a weakened, distracted leader
had a direct effect on everyone around him.
Well, extraordinary, I mean, very hard to sleep,
very hard to get your minds off all the things that might have
gone wrong, very hard not to think about the implications.
But, you know, I think we were consumed with the job,
especially this crucial one.
A test-fire to see if this whole idea would work.
And that was in everyone's mind, I think.
Fear of failure, problems with the implosion device,
even weather added to the strain
and pressure on the assembled scientists, military and staff.
The weather's a problem.
Oh, my God, the thunderstorms, I mean, rain and lightning.
And finally Groves says, "We're going at dawn,
"we're going to have the bomb test. Period."
Some scientists had grave concerns about the Gadget's enormous power.
As the countdown began,
they feared the bomb could ignite the atmosphere.
Groves is there with Vannevar Bush and his counterpart,
James Conant, who's the president of Harvard.
The three of them are huddled together,
and it goes through Conant's mind that maybe the predictions
about what might happen if there's an atomic explosion
might come to pass here and it might ignite the atmosphere.
Oppenheimer's brother, Frank, had been camped out at the Trinity Site.
They prepared for disaster.
We were located ten miles from the explosion, a little more.
It was not the closest group, it was next to the closest.
And we were told to lie down...
..with our backs to the explosion.
The critical moment had arrived.
Oppenheimer made a final solo trip to the site.
He climbed the tower and personally checked the Gadget.
No-one knew what would happen next.
There was a pool made
of what the magnitude of the shock should be.
I bet on the number that Rabi had predicted.
Namely eight kilotons.
I guessed that number, too. Something like 5,000.
Bethe calculated that, no,
the Earth was safe by several orders of magnitude.
Fermi stood up and I watched him, I knew he was going to do this.
He was only 20 or 30 feet away.
And he began dropping those famous pieces of paper.
So we all watched to see how far they would move.
And when the blast wave hit several seconds later,
he was able to measure the distance that the paper had been blown
by the blast wave and come up with a rough calculation of the yield.
There was tremendous uncertainty.
I bet I was the only one who lost the pool
because I bet too high.
Rabi won the pool and then later said he bet relatively high
out of courtesy.
Rabi was really getting quite excited, you know,
"Oh, it's going to happen," and Greisen was very relaxed.
Rabi said, "Gee, aren't you going to get excited?"
He said, "No, if you've been doing a lot of work with explosives
"you get fairly calm, I guess you have to."
And he was fairly...calm,
and Rabi said, "Well, you tell me when you get excited."
Then finally the countdown went down to, you know, minus a minute,
minus 30 seconds, minus 15 seconds.
At minus 15 seconds, Greisen nudged Rabi and said, "I'm excited!"
I had goggles and sunglasses and cardboard
and two or three different things to pick up.
I was at base camp and I actually was the person with the microphone
and a shortwave set, listening to the people reporting, and I was supposed
to read out the countdown, which I remember repeating when I heard...
McKibbin, I think it was, into the microphone,
saying, "We're now getting this,"
"now it's on automatic and I'll count with it."
And I started to pick up that count.
Eight, seven,
six, five,
four, three,
two, one.
The test was a triumph.
On July 16, 1945,
the world's first nuclear bomb was successfully detonated.
But it was almost immediately followed by sober reflection
on what they had created.
And the bomb goes off as scheduled.
Um, and it has quite an impact on everyone.
Groves ordered everyone who had witnessed the bomb test at Trinity
to give a written account,
and Lawrence said he was looking down
but he could see out of the edge of his eye the fireball,
and that the whole desert was suddenly as bright as day.
As though the sun had suddenly risen, and then, you know,
the same moment - but I couldn't see it that fast - the light came.
The light shone all around, I could see in peripheral vision quite well,
but I couldn't see the direct light for half a second or so.
And that was the thing actually that I think
stunned the scientists the most, was the light from the bomb.
And so the notion that it was in some way...
in the most elementary human way, competitive with the full sun,
that was the time that I got the sense of the power of the bomb, more than anything else.
As I looked down at the sand...
..it was like you were lifting the curtain in a darkened room
and the bright daylight coming in.
Now, THEN I was impressed.
But the shockwave was amazing.
At ten miles away.
It wasn't just noticeable, it would knock you down,
even at that distance.
That was a very, very impressive thing, to see that
coming across the desert.
I mean, it's really moving across at an incredible speed.
And you see this dust, this ring of dust coming,
and all of a sudden, whammo!
I did not care to see...
..literally what would kill people.
I knew it would help end the war
but it would cost a lot of lives in the procedure.
And so I did not go.
I didn't want to see it.
The most important memory of the entire experience
is before I got my hand up to start adjusting the goggles
I felt something that I didn't know...I hadn't been smart
enough to interpret, to figure out it was going to happen,
and nobody had thought of it, I think.
It was a cool desert morning,
the sun had not quite come up, the air was still...
It had that curious chill of a hot place
which is at its coolest hour of the day.
And suddenly on that cold background, the heat of the sun came to me
before the sun rose.
It was the heat of the bomb.
Not the light, but the heat was the first thing that I could feel.
Jack Aeby, incidentally,
he is the person that took that shot of the test bomb.
I knew when the detonation was to take place and at that time
I carried a chair up the road, out away from the base camp.
When the detonation finally occurred, it was easy to assume right quick
that that was not going to be a fizzle.
And, well, I just shot four pictures in a row.
I would have taken more except I ran out of film.
People assume that Oppenheimer had immediate guilt feelings
after the Trinity test,
when he recognised the dimensions of the destructiveness of this weapon.
That's not the case.
Actually I asked his brother, Frank Oppenheimer,
who was lying next to Robert Oppenheimer in the sand
when the bomb was tested at Trinity, I said,
"What did your brother say when it went off?"
And Frank said he wished he could remember the exact words
but it was to the effect of, "It worked."
Everybody cheered for a while and then it was kind of quiet.
Well, a mixture of elation and...awe.
As I was saying, like feeling the heat on your face
changes in a moment all the attitudes you might have.
No longer a commonplace thing.
Rabi is the one who said,
when the bomb went off, he could feel the heat,
and even in that situation of feeling the heat
that he got goosebumps.
He recognised immediately that the world had changed.
And the most interesting thing about that was
the collapse of security in the dining halls that evening,
because everyone was exchanging experiences about the explosion -
where they saw it from, what it was and so on.
Not just a few people, but a roar of such discussion.
I think everybody after the test felt...
he had made history.
And we were quite aware this would change world history from now on.
When the tests down on the southern part of the state were successful,
that...that felt good.
We could see the end of the war in sight.
There was the other scientist, Bainbridge,
who made the comment to Oppenheimer, I think,
that "Now we're all sons of bitches."
We knew the world would not be the same.
A few people laughed.
A few people cried.
Most people were silent.
Now it was going to be used on Japan, there's no doubt about it.
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
Vishnu...
..is trying to persuade the Prince that...
..he should do his duty,
and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form.
And says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
Groves prepared his report on Trinity for the Secretary of War.
But amongst the euphoria a new problem was emerging.
Just two months earlier,
defeating Hitler had been the scientists' goal.
It was the reason they had come to Las Alamos.
Our initial motivation for this project in the first place
was to beat Hitler to the bomb.
He's been defeated,
so now Japan is essentially standing alone in World War II.
Not all of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project
supported using nuclear weapons against Japan.
For the Europeans amongst them,
the threat from faraway Japan seemed minimal.
Confronted with the awesome power of the weapon they'd created,
the morality of using it came into sharper focus.
There was a very real worry that some scientists would quit.
You have to realise it was already past VE Day,
so it obviously wasn't something that would be used in Europe.
The amount of information we had
with respect to the progress of the war
was as limited as the newsreels that came out,
and so you still had no idea how these things might be used.
For the Americans on the team,
the shock and horror of Pearl Harbor was still fresh, and painful.
I had lost a lot of friends during the early parts of the war.
High-school friends, college friends, most of them in the Pacific.
I was on the softball team, I was a pitcher.
The catcher's name was Howard Eriksson,
he was killed in the Pacific,
so there was a certain...personal... rage against the Japanese.
During the war, we forget how... anti-Japanese the Americans were.
If you go back and look...
I'll never forget, I found an article in Time magazine one time,
right after Pearl Harbor,
and it talked about how you could tell
the difference between the Chinese and the Japanese,
and how Chinese are sweet and honest and good
and Japanese are furtive and, you know, mean,
and that's how you can tell the differences,
and they talked physically how you could tell the differences,
and it was very startling to someone who's living in this time period
to see something like that.
Because of humanity's way of doing things,
it was a necessity to put a stop to the major amount of killing,
which would have happened if we had to invade Japan.
There would have been millions killed
that otherwise weren't because of the bomb.
No, I thought that was great. Anything to end the war.
I think most of the scientists supported using nuclear weapons
to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible,
but there were some who thought the bombs were not necessary.
The recognition came home that this really had changed the world
and that this was going to be...
It was going to be different world
after this weapon was tested and worked.
There were scientists who argued
that, rather than use this weapon against a city to kill civilians,
that we should demonstrate it.
Like Leo Szilard, who's in Chicago.
And he had circulated a petition that the bomb should not be dropped...
..before the Japanese were first notified.
Will I please sign it and circulate it in Las Alamos?
I wanted to sign it
but I felt I could not circulate it without showing it to Oppenheimer.
I think it was. They had three or four two-or-three-mile runways
running the whole length of the island, really,
and 50,000 or 60,000 people.
Before Hiroshima, our group, 509th Composite Group, was pretty clearly
regarded with suspicion by the rest, because we never did anything.
And we never got
Well, they could see that
but they don't do much and they don't get any ordnance.
To give the crew combat experience,
the first one of those that was dropped,
Now they had worked out how to drop the bomb, the question was, where?
People mistakenly assume that there was a directive that said,
you know, "Bomb Hiroshima first and then bomb Nagasaki second."
Actually, the order from Truman was that the bombs,
bombs plural, should be used as soon as they are ready.
And there was a target list
that had been worked out in advance.
Hiroshima, obviously, was top of the list, one reason being
that it is somewhat on a flat terrain,
surrounded by high hills, so that as Groves said,
"It would contain the..." The bomb was set off at 1,800 feet,
it was an airburst. But the fireball would basically not touch the ground
but it... The effects of the bomb, the explosion would spread out,
as he said, and cause more physical destruction.
If they do not now accept our terms,
they may expect a rain of ruin from the air,
the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
It had taken 1,000 days to get here, another kind of D-Day,
decision day.
Would America, could America drop the bomb?
What would be the outcome for the war, for science,
for humanity?
They did not know any other way to...
..use the weapon effectively,
than to actually drop it.
I guess one of the fears was -
what was going to happen to us when the bomb went off?
Cos we had no idea what the yield was going to be
on Little Boy. We dropped three gauges on parachutes.
The Japanese thought the bombs were on parachutes, but they weren't -
it was our gauges. We measured the blast pressure
and telemetered it back to receivers we had in the back bomb bay in
The Great Artiste, which was our instrument plane.
There's an instrument plane, there's a photo plane,
and there's a weapon-carrying plane.
They developed this canister with diagnostic equipment,
that could be parachuted in behind the atomic bombs,
and take basic measurements of the blast.
So that was what Harold did during the war.
He also had the foresight to video...
Or to film and to photograph the atomic bombs.
DRAMATIC SCORE BUILDS
When the bomb went off...
It was a big flash. We only had about a six-inch window,
which is why we took some movies out of...
About a second or two later, we got slapped with the blast wave,
which really shook us up. Then we got...
Maybe two seconds later, we got another slap,
which has us puzzled.
Then we realised that that was the reflection from the ground,
because it had been detonated about 1,800 feet.
And so the photographs that we see, of the attacks on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki... We have those, in no small part,
thanks to Harold Agnew.
Louis...
CHUCKLING: The more I think about it, he was the most inventive person...
He knew, after the first drop...
He knew a physicist in Japan and he wrote a long letter
to this physicist...
"As scientists,
"we deplore the use to which a beautiful discovery has been put.
"But we can assure you, that unless Japan surrenders at once,
"this rain of atomic bombs will increase manyfold in fury."
Scotch-taped them to our canisters,
and then when we dropped our instrument gauges,
the canisters were picked up
and presumably the letters were delivered
to this particular Japanese physicist.
It may have had an effect on the Emperor's decision.
They had a little radio station - KRS.
Which was just within Los Alamos.
After... It must have been the Enola Gay...
They broadcast what is a wire, not a tape, of that drop.
And so you hear the engine...
I remember this real well... The engine of the plane...
"Rr-rr-rr." And then they start the countdown,
you know, "Ten, nine, eight..."
All I wrote down in my notebook is -
"It really went off. It really did."
That's all I wrote.
When they landed, there was a phalanx of brass there,
all the commanding officers that could get
their own transport from anywhere in the Pacific, were there.
And when that crew brought the plane to a stop, of course,
in front of a delegation of reception officers -
they jumped out of the plane and as they straightened up...
Spaatz, who I think was the senior general,
pinned an Air Force medal on each one
as his feet, so to speak, hit the runway.
Now, I think it was a surprise to everyone
that the bomb was as effective as it was.
The immediate reaction in Los Alamos after the first bomb
was dropped on Hiroshima, was one of elation.
It was elation, because, first of all, their work had paid off,
they had done what they had set out to do.
Even after the near total destruction of Hiroshima,
the Japanese refused to surrender.
And soon after, a second atomic bomb, the Fat Man,
was dropped on Nagasaki.
Niigata and Kokura were also on the list,
I think they were the primary...
I forget which was the primary target for Bockscar,
which carried the second bomb.
But because of weather conditions, the bomb was carried to Nagasaki,
which was the tertiary target.
I think the target was meant to be
the Mitsubishi aircraft engine manufacturing facility.
I asked Norris, "Well, you know, could you have had a test?"
And he said, "With the second bomb... In the first place,
"we weren't really sure it was going to work.
"If we had announced the test on an island or something,
"we were afraid the Japanese might have moved the American
"prisoners of war to that island."
Beyond the Nagasaki bomb, there was another bomb ready to go within
10 or 12 days. And a bomb after that, and a bomb after that.
The celebration at the Gadget's success and the war's end,
quickly turned to contemplation and fear.
What had they done? What would it mean for the future?
The question was asked over and over -
"Should we have used the bomb?"
And it's very, very mixed. At the end, after the war is over,
you have a group of scientists who just thought,
"I can't believe I did this, I should not have worked on it."
Einstein said he regretted writing his letter to President Roosevelt,
that got the whole project started in the first place.
And so there was this group of people that thought,
"We have created this monster, it's awful, we never should have done it."
I at once had the strong feeling...
..of regret. Not of having made the bomb,
but of not having signed the petition -
to show it before it was used.
It was not only justified, but necessary.
It was so overwhelming that the Emperor Hirohito
had to step in and say, "Enough is enough."
The creed, as far as the Japanese military,
was no surrender. It wasn't in their dictionary.
But fortunately, he realised that he should just overrule his military -
who wanted to continue, strictly for honour - and surrendered.
Saved a lot of their lives and certainly a lot of ours.
The whole objective was to end the war.
And we succeeded.
My feeling was, and still is,
that the war in Japan would have gone on in a horrible fashion,
for a long time, with great loss of life on both sides.
Because of the nature of the war as it had been fought
in the islands up to that time.
This is something you'll never know, there's no way of telling
how long the war would have gone if it hadn't been for the bomb.
In my opinion, millions of Japanese would have died...
..if we hadn't used the bomb. So, I believe that,
in this particular case, the bomb saved lives.