After witnessing the awesome blast, Oppenheimer quoted a line from a
sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita: He said: "I am become death, the
shatterer of worlds."[6] In Los Alamos 230 miles to the north, a group
of scientists' wives who had stayed up all night for the not so secret
test, saw the light and heard the distant sound. One wife, Jane Wilson,
described it this way, "Then it came. The blinding light [no] one had
ever seen. The trees, illuminated, leaping out. The mountains flashing
into life. Later, the long slow rumble. Something had happened, all
right, for good or ill."[7]
General Groves' deputy commander, Brigadier General T. F. Farrell,
described the explosion in great detail: "The effects could well
be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and
terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever
occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole
country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times
that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue.
It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range
with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to
be imagined..."[8]
Immediately after the test a Sherman M-4 tank, equipped with its own air
supply, and lined with two inches of lead went out to explore the site.
The lead lining added 12 tons to the tank's weight, but was necessary
to protect its occupants from the radiation levels at ground zero. The
tank's passengers found that the 100-foot steel tower had virtually
disappeared, with only the metal and concrete stumps of its four legs
remaining. Surrounding ground zero was a crater almost 2,400 feet across
and about ten feet deep in places. Desert sand around the tower had been
fused by the intense heat of the blast into a jade colored glass. This
atomic glass was given the name Atomsite, but the name was later changed
to Trinitite.
Due to the intense secrecy surrounding the test, no accurate information
of what happened was released to the public until after the second
atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan. However, many people in New
Mexico were well aware that something extraordinary had happened the
morning of July 16, 1945. The blinding flash of light, followed by the
shock wave had made a vivid impression on people who lived within a
radius of 160 miles of ground zero. Windows were shattered 120 miles
away in Silver City, and residents of Albuquerque saw the bright light
of the explosion on the southern horizon and felt the tremor of the
shock waves moments later.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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