¡Colores!; A Commitment to Peace; 610; Trinity: Getting the Job Done; Studio Interview with Robert W. Henderson, Part 4

It's people that weren't born at the time of the operation, and they were the frame of reference that their mind is in today. It's so far into a wartime frame of mind that there's no correlation, I don't pay any attention to them. They don't know what they're talking about, and they have a certain audience that listens to them, but it's not a very big audience. I don't really feel any differently about the bomb today than I did the day we fired the first one. I've seen some awful big ones, much bigger than that one down in El Magordo, but they're all quite similar. Well, that's some of what I wanted to really capture on tape, because I think that's

really important to say. Start out saying this is a letter I wrote to a friend of mine right after. Cam, I'm a little edgy here, unless you get into something. No, come on back too far. The frame of reference from which we start is the intense secrecy with which this whole development job had been carried out, which terminated on July 16, 1945. Having watched that termination, while it was all still fresh in my mind, I sat down to write a record of what I had seen, having been a part of that first detonation, and sent this letter

off to some friends of mine in California, who of course had lived in a total vacuum. They didn't know what I was doing or where it was or anything else. This is just a record of how it hit me at the moment. When minus one minute was called out, I lay flat on the ground with my head propped on my elbows and the dark glass all ready to show into place. These were welding glasses, arc welding glasses. At minus five seconds, I caught the flash of a five pound charge set off at the base of the tower and instantly slipped the dark glasses in place. This was just a timing charge, high explosive, to make a flash to clue people into the fact that five seconds hence the bomb was going to go. Then it came. The whole heavens and the crowds lit up with a white light many times brighter

than the sun. So intense that it came through the world's glass like a 60 watt bulb. In addition, stray light got in around the frames of my goggles and then I was really scared for I thought I was blind. Everything was white for an instant and then complete darkness. After an instant which seemed interminable, my sight gradually returned and I dropped the dark glasses to watch the explosion. Words cannot describe the seething ball of fire which was forming. The tower, 19 tons of steel had been instantly vaporized. The ball of fire grew larger and larger and then started to rise. At this point we dropped to the ground again and put our fingers in our ears and started to yell to the offset the blast when it hit us. The overpressure from this blast was pretty heavy. We had been warned

by the doctors that we should plug our ears before it hit us and we could predict when it was going to hit. We knew where we were and where the shot was and knew the velocity of sound so we knew when the bang was going to hit us. It seemed ages for the sound to travel the 20 miles but oh boy, when it hit it was a daily. By the time the ball of fire was approximately a mile and a half in diameter and was rising at a rate of 180 miles an hour all is estimated by a hand triangulation device. In less than a minute the products of the explosion had cooled beyond the luminous range and had ascended to the 20,000 foot level. Finally reaching 40,000 feet in about five minutes. It had worked. An interesting satellite is the effect the blast had on the bank of clouds over the shot at an elevation

of some 17,000 feet. These clouds instantly disappeared as the shock wave hit them rolling back in giant waves which evaporated into clear sky. This phenomenon was followed by another even more astounding one. All shock waves are followed by a rarefaction or negative pressure region. When this rarefaction occurs in a moist atmosphere normally above its dew point the sudden reduction in pressure creates a super saturation characterized by the formation of a vapor cloud which lasts only for the duration of the negative pressure phase. Such a vapor cloud formed on a tremendous awe-inspiring scale then disappeared as quickly as it had formed. This was truly history in the making. All of this phenomenology had

been predicted by the scientists of the settlement. We had been told all this ahead of time that this would be what we saw if the clouds were there. This sequence of events on this sort of a timescale would be there. They didn't want us to be surprised by something so we were just observing what we had been told we would be observing. The rest you all know Hiroshima and Nagasaki are immune evidence of the gigantic power of which our development is only the first crew to attempt to engineer and to use. We thank God that we were successful in completing the bomb during a war and in using it before the eyes of the world. If such a weapon were developed in secret in peacetimes the havoc it could wreak in a sneak attack by another country would wipe out every major city in the United States in one day. This

is no exaggeration. Let us hope and actively work for an international control body to govern the future of atomic power. If this is not gone we who have succeeded in scratching the surface of this unbelievable source of energy have only death and destruction to look forward to. It is unthinkable raising children into a world governed day and night by hideous fear which is the only alternative. As for my plans now that the world is over all I can say is that our work is far from done. It will be here indefinitely or at least until Washington and other nations that work out some reasonable agencies for control. I think it is rather interesting if you read today's paper. Congress is on hazelow

weary in this budget reduction business talking about the Department of Energy. For a long long time a number of us have felt that there were some cabinet level jobs that really ought to be done away with and the earmark now the Department of Commerce is one the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. For a long time I have felt that there was really no reason for these departments. I agree with what they are talking about but how they go about doing it is the thing that really concerns me because I think there is an awful lot of politicians that are just playing around with these ideas and they have no concept of what they are talking about. Hazelow weary is one of them. I really worry about her. I don't know how she ever got the job but there she is and where it is going to go. God only knows. There are too many cabinet members, too many departments. There is

no reason for them and they should be eliminated one by one and how their work will be shifted around the remaining ones. I don't know but just to chop them all off and walk away from somebody that will never work and so I don't know where they will end up. Back up a little bit here you said it worked. The next inflammation plan was kind of curious about that. What is that exactly? Having worked on as long as I did and knowing all the facets of it and all the times we came to Crossroads, do we go this way or do we go that way and what's the payoff here if we do this versus do that? The fact that it worked essentially exactly as we had predicted to work I think it was rather amazing and it didn't happen by accident. It had been thought through thoroughly and been argued by many, many people so that the

final result was no one man's work. It was a whole team of people working in a coordinated way and dreaming up all the kinds of alternatives and all the kinds of screw ups that we could get into and coming up with the right answer. It's a rather remarkable job of coordination and the people that were in the key positions during that whole show were the ones that put it all together. Here we are 50 years later and we'll just talk about what I wanted to do with the camera on him. What do you think? You made this thing work on the war. What are some of those thoughts? Well I think it is still the most useful weapon that the world has at its disposal. I believe firmly and it was in this morning's newspaper that many thousands of lives were saved by our dropping those two bombs on Japan to the country of

what these two gooders are saying now that it was a mistake to kill all these people. We saved thousands of lives by dropping those two bombs. Yes, we killed some people but there would have been many, many more kill had we not dropped those bombs and we never would have been allowed to fire that bomb had we not had a war. We would never have been allowed to put on a demonstration for the world of watch. It would never get there politically somebody would stop it. So the only way we could get this thing out on the open was to fire during a war and we succeeded in doing that. You ready? Can you proud of your work here? Proud. I don't know. The word proud is not an appropriate word for this. I'm delighted that our efforts came to fruition the way they

did. I don't know how anyone can be proud about this sort of a thing but it had to be. It was there. It has been said by some real, the world's greatest thinkers that knowledge cannot be denied. There's no way you can walk away from something that exists in science or in nature and say we'll all forget about it. It'll stay there. It won't. It'll come out. So knowledge cannot be denied. Anybody that says that we can hide from the facts of physics or the facts of nature simply by ignoring it and not probing into it is crazy. It'll be dug up by somebody and you want to make sure it's dug up by the right people.

I have always argued that you can never, ever walk away from knowledge. It'll come out sooner or later. Winning the war had a lot to do with it. Oh, yeah. It was in the right direction. Did you have a little party? Frankly, no. We were all pretty tired. Yeah, there were small parties but there were no great celebrations at all about that. Here we are at the end of a long, long time. Anything I left out, anything you want to say to put into this record. Like Sonebert says, we're giving you guys the transmitter. Dealing with Trinity, dealing with winning the war. No, I think as you begin to put this stuff together into whatever format you want, then there'll be opportunities to edit. But as of now, I couldn't think of anything that I could add to what's been said that would make any sense. It'll be out of context. You've

got to see it in the total context to have it. I just wonder if there was any closing words you wanted to have just with the whole thing. No, I'm glad to have been able to be a part of the whole business and I had a rather unique position as I look back at all the other people that I've known that had a facet here and a facet there and a facet over here. I'm the only one that I can think of who was with this thing from Super Nuts all the way through and had a lot of personal friendships with the top people all the way through. The whole program I was always associated with the top brass. That and itself was a wonderful experience to see how these guys were internally with themselves and with others, how they coordinate their thinking.

They talk about the great brains of the world. Until you see them in action, it never comes home to you. You can read all you want to about them and you just cannot put it all together. But once you see how they interact with each other under different circumstances, you really don't begin to appreciate who these people are. It was a remarkable gathering of the greatest brains in the world, the whole Manhattan district, Manhattan Project. It's never been done before, it's never been done since. I don't know if there would be a need to, but it was a terrific experience to watch the interaction between these great brains. Even though you're on the outside looking in, it was fun to watch them. Now, a lot of this show is about the engineering, about the guys who didn't get in the history

books. You feel like thick ones almost. Anything you want to say to kind of sum up the engineering aspect, so do you? No. Would you include the engineering in those great brains? Accomplishment results from the integration of a whole lot of different things. Starting with basic knowledge, basic physics, basic mathematics, these sorts of things are put together to make some kind of a model, some kind of a structure. There's no one of them. Physics chemistry, mathematics, engineering are all part of the same ball racks. Engineering is an outgrowth of physics and chemistry, metallurgy. None of these things are self-sufficient.

Collectively they make some sense, and it's the pulling and tugging between these various inputs that arrives at the truth. There is an awful lot of pulling and tugging because there's a number of ideas which are thought over a long period of time to be true, have been proven to be false. And it's only the passage of time and the continual searching and questioning, the results of the previous thinking has there been development and improvement. And this will continue throughout eternity. There's no such thing as the answer to any problem. You get one thing solved and suddenly you hit with something else that grew out of it, the derivative of it.

Okay, I'm still going to plug away at this a little bit. Do you think the engineer has got enough credit on this project? Yeah, I am. You use the word credit. To me, credit largely is in the minds of the person who it's attributed to. Credit to me is something that you feel in your own mind. It's not something that somebody gives you. You know what you've done and how it fit into the overall picture that you were working on. And only you can evaluate that. Everything that's written in magazines, newspapers or anything else is hearsay. It's somebody else's interpretation of what happened. You know what happened from your own viewpoint. And that is the important

thing. It's what you think of yourself and how that reflects on your surroundings and the people around you. That's important. What the press says about it means nothing. What the media says about it is trivia. It's usually wrong. Let me try it this way. Did the engineers on the Manhattan Project and the provisional guys, the SCDs, the civilian guys like you? Did you do a good job? I think we did. I think we did a fine job. I wouldn't do anything differently. If I were doing it all over again, I would not. It's the interaction between all these various sources of input that's important. No one man, no one set of circumstances can arrive at the perfect answer. There's always something to come along that shape.