8/31/2023 0 Comments Atomic fireballsHow to keep such a spectacle under wraps? Oppenheimer and his colleagues considered several sites, including a patch of desert around two hundred miles east of Los Angeles, an island eighty miles southwest of Santa Monica, and a series of sand bars ten miles off the Texas coast. The operation was designated as top secret, which was a problem, since the whole point was to create an explosion that could be heard for a hundred miles around and seen for two hundred. But Oppenheimer later claimed not to recall where the name came from. Oppenheimer’s former mistress, Jean Tatlock, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, when he was a professor there, had introduced him to Donne’s work before she committed suicide, in early 1944. government’s laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the director of science for the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the bomb, chose the name as an allusion to the poetry of John Donne. The test was given the evocative code name of Trinity, although no one seems to know precisely why. Then the air expands outward, shedding its energy at the speed of sound-the blast wave that destroys houses, hospitals, schools, cities. The heat is such that the air around it becomes luminous and incandescent and then opaque for a moment, the brightness hides itself. Where else, except in the interiors of stars, do the temperatures reach into the tens of millions of degrees? It is that blistering radiation, released in a reaction that takes about a millionth of a second to complete, that makes the light so unearthly, that gives it the strength to burn through photographic paper and wound human eyes. Seventy years ago today, when the first atomic weapon was tested, they called its light cosmic. This is because the heat of a nuclear explosion is unlike anything else on Earth. The light of a nuclear explosion is unlike anything else on Earth.
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