https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2024/07/16/trinity-and-the-parts-left-out-of-oppenheimer/
Trinity and the Parts Left Out of Oppenheimer
First atomic test was 79 years ago this morning.
by Greg Mitchell Posted on July 16, 2024
Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s substack Between Rock and a Hard Place.
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Entire books have been written about the test, so I’ll just touch on one key issue here briefly. It’s related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era.
In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren’t sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, “The Father of the Bomb,” worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain.
Indeed, scientists warned of danger to those living downwind from the Trinity site but, in a pattern-setting decision, the military boss, General Leslie Groves, ruled that residents not be evacuated and kept completely in the dark (at least until they spotted a blast brighter than any sun). Nothing was to interfere with the test. When two physicians on Oppenheimer’s staff (though not Oppie himself) proposed an evacuation, Groves replied, “What are you, Hearst propagandists?”
Admiral Williams Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff – who opposed dropping the bomb on Japan – placed the bomb in the same category as “poison gas.” And, sure enough, soon after the shot went off before dawn on July 16, scientists monitored some alarming evidence. Radiation was quickly settling to earth in a band thirty miles wide by 100 miles long. A paralyzed mule was discovered twenty-five miles from ground zero.
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I was really shocked … …
“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” Captain Renault in Casablanca
… … at the values of the Gooferment politicians and bureaucrats.
I’d never heard this before, but surprisingly I was never informed about this atrocity.
Argh!
—30—
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