Destroyer Of Worlds ?

(Destroyer Of Worlds ?)

The man who brought a second dawn. On July 16th, 1945, the first atomic bomb, code named Trinity, detonated with a yield of 21-25 kilotons. A spherical device, nicknamed the "Gadget," contained a plutonium core surrounded by a series of shaped charges, compressed the core inward to a point of super-criticality. Fission was initiated and there was a big explosion, the largest seen on earth to date. There were many who contributed to the success of Trinity but the one most perhaps most responsible is Dr. J Robert Oppenheimer who was made director of the Los Alanis Lab and who is the subject of an eponymously named picture, to be released this Friday.

The road to Trinity was years in the making and it involved some of the most famous scientists of the age, including Albert Einstein and his E-mc² that indicated that a little mass could be transformed to a lot of energy, which was the initial suggestion for an atomic bomb. The impetus had been the threat that Nazi Germany could develop a device on its own and would be a disaster for the Western Democracies.

The physicist that first theorized on the concept of a chain-reaction, where a heavy atom like plutonium. or enriched weapons' grade uranium, was bombarded by a heavy particle, a neutron, would in turn release further neutrons that would hit more atoms and so on until the mass was consumed and, if there was sufficient material, a critical mass, then an explosion occurs. The plutonium core at Trinity was a few pounds of material, the size of a grapefruit.

In any event, President Roosevelt was made aware by a letter from Einstein and the other scientist and ordered the formation of the Manhattan Engineering District, that, in time, was re-named the Manhattan Project. After Pearl Harbor and the realization of the data a German bomb posed, no expense was spared. General Leslie Groves, the man who had built the Pentagon was chosen to head the Project. But he needed an egg-head to manage the teams of physicists and engineers that would develop and construct the device. The end result was the Gadget and the successful test at Trinity. And the egg-head in question was a young theorist from Berkley. That was Oppenheimer.

There were three centers of fissile material production; Los Alamos, where Oppenheimer and others were to resolve outstanding issues but also at Oak Ridge, Tennessee where uranium was enriched to weapons' grade and Hanford, Washington that produced plutonium. All three installations were a network of trial and error. but in the end, it paid off.

Naturally, Trinity had an audience, among them Oppenheimer, Groves and a few other people. The explosion apparently made an impression on the Los Alamos head. Recalling a passage from the Hindu poem, the Bhagavad Gita:

"Now, I am become death. Destroyer of Worlds"