The Day The Sun Rose Twice by
Ferenc Morton
SzaszUniversity of New Mexico Press
177 Pages
Copyright 1984
Subtitle:
The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion July 16, 1945I remember when and where I bought this book – I was on a road trip with my mother and we were at White Sands Monument, in their gift shop. The title caught my eye and it seemed like an interesting souvenir, one that was better than the usual touristy junk. You know what I mean.
That was back in the early 1990’s and the book went onto my bookshelf and stayed there. The title would catch my eye but I never felt compelled to pick it up. Not really. Not until Trish and her Non-fiction Five Challenge. Thanks for the push, Trish.
The Day The Sun Rose Twice is an easy-to-read, fascinating account of the days leading up to the test of the world’s first atomic bomb. It is a
concise and somewhat science light and deals more with the physical obstacles that stood in the way. It also touches on the politics of the situation and the world at the time.
I’
ve read accounts of how the team of scientists
didn’t get along, how there was in-fighting and petty jealousy between them. There is little of that in
Szasz’s book. He tends to focus on the positive parts:
More important than the scenery, however, was the deep sense of purpose that the group shared. The men and women of Los Alamos formed an international community that was engaged in a life-or-death struggle to beat the Germans to the secret of atomic power. This goal gave the town its fierce intensity. In 1975, physicist Hans A. Bethe confessed that never, either before or after, had he worked as hard as he did during his years at Los Alamos. “It was one of the few times in my life,” said another well-known physicist, “when I felt truly alive.”
There were a couple of things about this book that stand out for me. One, that it does seem, given all the advancements in physics at the time, that the development of the atomic bomb was a forgone conclusion. The argument will never be over as to the wisdom of it and there can be no doubt that the entire world would be better off without nuclear weapons, but the facts at the time made it inconceivable that the bomb
wouldn’t be created. And, overall, I believe it was probably better that it was us and not Nazi German that did it.
The second thing was the conclusion
Szasz reaches about whether or not Truman needed to use even one bomb much less two. He states:
Once Truman learned of the enormous success of Trinity, he faced a ‘decision.’ What he did was make the simplest decision a person can make. He did nothing. In a sense he made no decision at all. He allowed a process that had been under way in earnest since 1941 to continue unabated.
Once that process was started, all phases of it were on-going at the same time. Before the bomb was even tested in the New Mexico desert, the base on
Tinian Island, part of the Northern Marianas Islands, was being prepared as the launch site for the attack on Japan. It seems, with what
Szasz puts forth, that it truly was the inevitable outcome, no matter what. Churchill was behind it. So were the other allies of the day. To not use such an impressive new weapon seemed impossible to them.
Here is
Szasz’s description of the blast itself:
On Monday, July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 A.M., Mountain War Time, the bomb ignited. The explosion created a brilliant flash that was seen in three states. It lit up the sky like the sun, throwing out a multicolored cloud that surged 38,000 feet into the atmosphere within about seven minutes. As the cloud rose, observers noticed large objects skyrocketing down from its lower third. For over an hour the immediate area lay covered with a pall of smoke. The herds of antelope darted off at full speed, and no one has yet guessed where they might have first paused. The heat at the center of the blast approximated that at the center of the sun, and the light created equaled almost twenty suns. At ten miles away people felt a blast of heat equivalent to standing about three feet from a fireplace. Where the fireball touched the ground, it created a crater half a mile across, fusing the sand into greenish gray glass that was later termed atomsite or trinitite. Every living thing within the radius of a mile was annihilated – plants, snakes, ground squirrels, lizards, even the ants. The stench of death lingered about the area for three weeks.
Szasz also notes that the regret some of the scientists felt about their work came some time after the initial testing. The Trinity test was met with elation and enthusiasm. Time had to pass before they reflected and examined what they had done, leading J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘the father of the Atomic Bomb’ to comment:
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."Recommendation: It is an easy, interesting, concise, fact-filled book on a time in history that is still subjected to much debate. It may be overly positive but it is still an informative work.
