I felt like sharing a little today. For several years I have been working on a novel, off & on, in my spare time. The idea is part historical non-fiction & part science-fiction. The following is a rough draft of the (short) Prologue. I hope you enjoy.

Prologue

 -July, 16th 1945

-Remote corner of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, New Mexico

-Early Morning.

This was it. 4 Years, 130,000 people, & nearly 2 billion dollars and it all came down to this moment in time. Two men from totally different worlds. Major General Leslie Groves, a regimented military man, who believed in honor, discipline, god & country. The son of a pastor, a “man’s man” if you will. On the other side, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, a introverted, thoughtful, soft-spoken, intellectual. Son of a painter & a wealthy Jewish textile importer. What could be called a “West-coast liberal” with communist friends. In any other circumstance these two wouldn’t have spoken to each other, yet for this cause they came together. This would be the first time Einstein’s mass to energy conversion theorem would be put to the test. This was Trinity.

What mostly bothered Robert was not so much the theory or equations, it was  the engineering & design of “The Gadget” that was the variable. This was the highly complex, Plutonium core, implosion device. Because it took so long to enrich uranium this was an attempt to use plutonium which could be refined more quickly. The problem was, the uranium gun-type device would not work with plutonium, as it decayed faster than critical mass could be achieved. Thus, the idea was to use explosives to force a near solid, sub-critical P-239 spherical core to compress very quickly to achieve critical mass and thus fission. For this to work though the explosives had to explode at exactly the same time, down to the millisecond, therein lies the problem. This was extremely difficult to achieve. The device had been assembled to exacting standards, the core was placed inside, & “the gadget” hoisted to the top of a 100 foot firing tower, awaiting its date with destiny.

It had been cloudy and raining all morning. Robert and Gen. Groves standing at the S-10,000 control bunker, discussed what to do as they already had to scrub the 4:00a.m.test. It looked like they would get a slight break in the weather around 5:30a.m.Shortly after 5:00the device was armed and everyone retreated to the bunkers. Gen. Groves left Robert at the S-10,000 bunker and went back to base camp. As the seconds ticked down over the loud speaker, 10..9..8..7.. it seemed as if time itself slowed as the suspense built, 4..3..2....1....BOOM! At first, it was to bright to see anything, but as the sky slowly darkened one could begin to faintly make out the mushroom cloud rising almost 8 miles in to the sky. The percussion of the shock-wave could be felt over 100 miles away. The intense heat turned the desert sand in to a mildly radioactive light green glass, which would be later named “trinitite”. This was the largest instantaneous release of energy in all of human history, equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT. It was an awesome sight to behold. The most common immediate reactions were surprise, joy, and relief. Oppenheimer very simply said: “it worked”. In that instant, the entire world changed forever, even if we didn’t know it yet.

Soon shock, awe, & euphoria gave way to more sobering realizations. All this time everyone had been so caught up with the question “can we?” that no one bothered to ask “should we?” Now the ethics of the whole thing started to wash over everyone. No where was this more evident than in Oppenheimer’s “Destroyer Of Worlds” Speech. In the days and weeks ahead several scientists tried to stop the gears of war from using these terrible weapons on the populations of Japan and instead give the world a demonstration to scare the Japanese into surrender. It was too late, the genie was out of the bottle. The powers that be had already decided to use both of the other two prototype weapons. The only uranium weapon code-name “Little Boy” was dropped above Hiroshima Aug, 6th 1945 with a measured yield equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT. Three days later, Aug, 9th 1945, the other plutonium bomb, code-name “Fat Man”, was dropped over Nagasaki with a measured yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT. The human & environmental repercussions were worse than anyone could have ever imagined, and were not only instant, but would linger for years to come. Throughout the following decades, this would become one of the most difficult yet poignant ethical lessons ever learned in the annals of scientific discovery.

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