Stephen Walker - Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima

THIRTY-TWO

ZERO PLUS EIGHTEEN HOURS

I N LOS ALAMOS it was now noon. From his office

PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT

EPILOGUE

ENDNOTES

SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

PERMISSIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CREDITS

COVER

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

For Sally,
whose love, spirit, and indomitable courage
inspired every word

T WELVE MILES NORTH of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Highway 502 breaks westward from Route 285 at a little junction called Pojoaque. Take the turn, and you quickly find yourself climbing into the cool heights of the Pajarito mountains. The road snakes upward, higher and higher, winding past the ancient Indian settlements with their resonant Spanish names: Jaconita, El Rancho, San Ilde-fonso Pueblo. The air becomes perceptibly brighter and clearer. The heady scent of ponderosa pines permeates through the open car window. The view is utterly, enticingly glorious. To the east lie the distant peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range; to the south a wide basin, rich in yellows and pinks and greens, rolling back toward the haze of Santa Fe; to the west, the high mesa of the Jemez Plateau , and a small town that once harbored one of the worlds biggest secrets: Los Alamos, the place where the first atomic bombs were built.

I was there in May 2004, to meet a contributor as part of the research for this book. But halfway up the road I stopped to take in the view. It was midday and despite the altitudeover 7,000 feetthe sun burned the asphalt, creating shimmering pools of air back along the way I had come. The silence was overwhelming. With a sudden shock, I realized that on this very same stretch of highway, fifty-nine years ago, on a sunny summers morning just like this one, a closed black truck escorted by seven carloads of security guards crawled down the mountain from Los Alamos, past the old Indian pueblos, past the place where I had now parked my car, down into the plains of Santa Fe. The date was Saturday, July 14,1945. Inside the black truck, sitting in a sealed lead bucket, was the uranium projectile for an atomic bomb. That afternoon, it was flown from Albuquerque to San Francisco. Two days later it sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in the USS Indianapolis on its way across the Pacific. Twenty-three days later it was carried in the bomb bay of the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay to the city of Hiroshima, where it exploded, killing at least 80,000 people. The journey started here, in these beautiful mountains with their limitless horizons. It ended there, at 9:16 A.M. on August 6, 1945, some 6,000 miles away, on the other side of the world. I was standing on a piece of history.

That journey became my journey. Over the following weeks and months, I followed in the bombs footsteps. I visited extraordinary places, I met extraordinary people. I spoke to men who had flown the mission to Hiroshima, to scientists who had built the bomb, to people who had survived it. I had tea with old ladies in Hiroshima hotels who told me stories of pain, despair, and courage beyond any imagining. I had dinner in a Chinese restaurant in California with the man who navigated the Enola Gay and its weapon over 1,500 miles of the Pacific. I sat in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, living room with the nuclear physicist who carried the core of the worlds first atomic bomb, tested in New Mexico three weeks earlier, in a suitcase on the backseat of his car.

I traveled from one coast of the United States to the other, to several cities in Japan, and finally to the tiny, remote island of Tinian in the western Pacific from where Enola Gay departed one tropical night on its mission to Hiroshima. On the way I collected odd pieces of physical evidence that sit in my study as I write: a piece of faintly radioactive trinitite, the strange, greenish, bomb-blasted earth that still surrounds the site of the first atomic test in New Mexico; a shard of crushed coral, still gleaming white, from the abandoned, jungle-rotted runway where Enola Gay took off six decades ago; a handful of rubble from the Peace Dome in Hiroshima, the one building in the city preserved exactly as it was on the day the bomb fell.

My journey has encompassed moments whose meanings I will always struggle to comprehend. I have been shocked, disturbed, thrilled, appalled, entranced, amazed, and deeply moved. In listening to peoples stories, and in the many accounts I also read, I found myself struck again and again by the confluence of events: the revelation of experiencing the same episode from so many different points of view. This became the core of my book. In moving between eyewitnesses on various parts of the globe I have tried to present one of the most decisive moments in history as it was experienced by people famous and obscure, powerful and ordinary, who lived it in the moment. We know what happened on that August morning in 1945. They did not.