5 Comments

1. A big badda-boom! Badda big, big boom…

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2. 5th element reference!

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3. General Leslie Groves reviewed the effects of this blast in a report that reached Truman in Potsdam, by courier, on July 21st:

   an incredible fire ball as bright as several midday suns; a mushroom cloud that shot 41,000 feet into the substratosphere; a tremendous crash that broke a window 125 miles away; a crater 1,200 feet in diameter; a forty-ton steel tower one-half mile from the explosion destroyed. The Pentagon (whose construction Groves had directed) was not a safe shelter from such a bomb, he concluded. “With the assistance of the Office of Censorship we were able to limit the news stories to the approved release supplemented in the local papers by brief stories from the many eyewitnesses not connected with our project. One of these was blind woman who saw the light.”

   – Martin J. Sherwin, “A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance,” 1977

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4. Truman should have asked Stalin for his copy of the briefing thus saving that courier the long trip from Washington to Potsdam.

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5. The part of the story that still amuses and haunts me: The physicists were taking bets on the yield. Ramsey was down for “dud”. Teller had 45 kilotons. Oppenheimer chose 300 tons. Fermi had a grim sense of humor and was taking outside bets that the atmosphere would ignite and had outcomes ranging from the entire world destroyed to just the state of New Mexico being incinerated. There were others, but Rabi won with 18 kilotons.

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