This is an account of a journey to the remote atolls of the Marshall Islands to watch the fierce and frightening explosion of an atom bomb. On the island of Kwajalein one could talk to a scientist about the ultimate nature of matter. On the island of Einewetok one could stand on the air strip and watch an airplane come in for a landing. One could also look into a television screen and watch that airplane looking at himself. One saw oneself standing there watching the plane come in. There was no one in the plane. Radioactivity was a word that bobbed up in small talk, not in an academic way, but as something shortly to be around oneself. One was completely soaked in the magical reality of electronic science. This was the door leading to the new world. One wondered irrelevantly how the comicstrip authors would make out in the next ten years or so. Buck Rogers and Superman will then be terribly stuffy. Facts will surpass imagination. “About the only thing you can be certain of,” said the scientist, “is the speed of light.” “I know that one,” I said. “It is 186,000 miles per second.” Outside the train the fine, flat, fertile field of the Platte River Valley In Nebraska stretched away. The rows of corn held small green growth and farmers cultivated the land. Inside the train, men from the corners of the earth were hurrying to keep a date with an atom. They were military men and scientists and observers from the United Nations. They were going to Crossroads.
“There are a few other tangibles,” the scientist went on, “but you wouldn’t understand them.” “Physicists confuse me,” I told him. “Physicists confuse each other,” he replied. He looked quite lugubrious about it. “You have split the atom,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “You have knocked electrons out of their orbits and made a great noise in the world.” “Electrons are not in orbits. That is, if there are electrons.” He annoyed me. “Look,” I said, “before I came on this trip I tortured my brain with books on the atom on nuclei and protons and electrons and neutrons and orbits—and now you tell me that what miasmic knowledge I managed to squeeze out is not sooth?” “You are correct,” he answered. For an hour he told me of physics and what the world and nature are made up of in the physicist’s mind. He took me to where the speed of light is tangible and where everything else is mathematical symbol. He took me to the edge of knowledge, where even the atom ceases to exist and matter becomes a frequency, or a cone, or fast flying electrons, or something. “There is nothing certain. We decided in 1925,” he said. “Then we came to the Principle of Uncertainty, that we must base all calculations on probability. You can, for instance.” he went on as he picked up a matchbox, “figure the possibility of the molecules in this box all suddenly going in one direction and the box flying out the window. It is a remote possibility—one in ten to the fiftieth power–but it is there." “Let’s get to the atom bomb.” I asked. “The atom bomb—?” he shrugged. The atom bomb was a bygone thing to him. Science had split the atom; let other scientists find out what has been done, He wanted to get along with his search into the nature of things. This romping around the world was just an interruption. “There is a mathematical tangible,” he went on, “E equals MC squared. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. When you see the bomb go off, you will see that formula come to life. That formula saved astronomers acute embarrassment.” “For instance?” “Astronomers are secretive. They kept a secret for a time. Their secret was that they had discovered something that did not make sense even to an astronomer. They discovered that the companion star of the star Sirius, was both big and small. They did not say much about it, because they did not want people to know that they had worked themselves into a position of deciding that something was both big and small. The companion to the star Sirius looked small but acted big. So they were asked to believe that such a condition was possible, and E equals MC squared proved it. The star was small, but a matchbox full of it would weigh one ton. It is also big. The astronomers were very relieved.” I could tell you more about E equaling MC squared if I could remember more. As a matter of fact, I could not recapture his statements two hours later. He had things to say about Time which were far from lucid. He talked about Motion. “This train is going west. The earth is twirling east. The earth also wobbles a bit on its axis. We are going around the sun. Our own small portion of the universe is traveling in space—and, by the way, if you travel far enough into space you come back to where you started from—so in what direction do you care to say you are moving?” I did not care to say. A farmer waved to the train as it passed. He probably thought it was going west.
In the Nevada twilight, I sat in the dining car brooding over the scientist who sat there eating just like other people because they have very tangible digestive systems. The barren landscape rolled by and the mountain lined the plain not too far away. A small and dreary house by the edge of the stream came to the window and passed. It was a remote and unattractive spot. The waiter looked at the house. “That,” he said, “is all they know.” He chuckled as he said it, and I could not make out whether he thought they were well fixed or to be pitied. Personally, I could not make up my mind, and I haven't made it up yet. The speed of light and the hanky-panky that comes out of mathematical formula is no concern of theirs. It is not, however, remoteness that saves them from the tribulations of thought. Look at the natives of the remote island of Bikini, who have been moved away to another island because of this puttering around with the verities. Anyway, there they are, both of them. At a small bar in San Francisco, I came upon my first contact with slot machines. In our part of the world, we do not have them. In the Marshall Islands they were ubiquitous. On my first contact with them, they were merely machines which gobbled up my money. Time and observation, however, have changed that opinion. Slot machines are a dreary guidepost to the conduct of man. I hope I am wrong, since, if I am not, we can all kiss ourselves goodbyes and turn the planet over to some future race of rational beings. You cannot win from a slot machine. Even if you do win, you promptly pour the gain back into the gadget. No one, apparently, can resist them. Even scientists with their finger-on the pulse of probability feed them coins. It is possible that, by some strange alchemy, within their mechanical bodies is an evil spirit, an hypnotic spirit. What other explanation is there for the fact that people plunge their good money down the throats of the one armed bandits? They know they can't win. They don't even want to win. The alternative to the evil spirit as an explanation of such irrational conduct is to face the facts. Man must be irrational. He is willing to face the probabilities that go so much against him, throw aside his common sense, and proceed to the destruction of his pocket book. Faced with the certainty of his own destruction, if he does not curb his desire to play at war, will man resist the impulse to toss a few atomic bombs into the bloody game? I doubt it, I would think, as I dropped more quarters into the jangling maw of a slot machine.
You get into a plane and it climbs into the sky and, twelve hours after you leave San Francisco, the plane slides down out of the sky and you are on the island of Oahu. There is nothing tangible about that either. You don't see the air that holds you up. You have no sensation of motion. You just get into something at one place and get out at another. It is quite uncanny. And also tiring. “As long as Newton's LAw of Gravity holds, the airplane is going to be a fundamentally unsound and dangerous vehicle.” a fellow passenger said. “I talked to a chap on a train,” I reassured him, “who told me there's been some changes made. Only the speed of light is still with us.” That made us both feel comfortable and we went to sleep over the Pacific Ocean. One of the very minor sciences is publicity. To crib a line from Ring Lardner, when I say minor I am not groping for words. However, this activity has one monument to its credit., one achievement that it can point to. My reference is to the beach at Waikiki. With the aid of soft Hawaiian background music, publicity has taken this sorry bit of sand and made it world-renowned as something one simply must see. If it’s beaches you want, go to Brazil or even to Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, and see a beach. If it is the beach at Waikiki you are after, leave your traveling to your imagination. This is a digression and has nothing to do with physics or the laws of chance or the major matter of living. It is merely the account of the bursting of a small bubble.
The island of Kwajalein was once covered with palm trees and must have been as pretty an island as are the others in the Marshall group. It went to war. Now it has not much to offer to the eye. It is a mess of roads and air strips and barracks and oil tanks. The surf breaks on the sea side but you do not hear it, as the automobiles on the island are stripped of mufflers. Either the mufflers rotted off in the humid air or the boys who drive them like to hear their trucks and jeeps roar. There are two schools of thought. To my mind, the island of Kwajalein offers plenty of awe. The bomb drop was staged from there, and the simple business of taking a bomb into the air and letting it go at the battleship Nevada on Bikini Lagoon 250 miles away became a very complicated problem indeed. It required aircraft and cameras and scientists and the general efforts of 42,000 men. You heard of electronics and television planes that fly with no one aboard them and Geiger counters. You heard of the Geiger counters very much, since the word that recurred in all conversations about the bomb, no matter what the approach to the subject, was radioactivity . Geiger counters measure radioactivity. Radioactivity, when loose in the world and rampant on its own, is not healthy for man nor beast. It kills. It kills with gamma rays. You can protect yourself from gamma rays by hiding behind great sheets of lead. The lead, however, does not stop flying neutrons, and flying neutrons in the end are just as deadly.
At Hiroshima, people within a mile and a half of the bomb-burst just up and died from radioactivity. Some few did not, and what physiological good fortune saved them is not known. So at Kwajalein a good deal of thought and talk went on about the cloud that arises when the bomb goes off. It seethes with radioactivity. Preparations were at hand to evacuate islands all over the immediate Pacific Ocean in case the cloud began to blow in the wrong directions. I talked to two young men who were manning a little boat that was to run into Bikini Lagoon two hours after the blast and scoop up water–radioactive water. They were very unhappy young men; their boat leaked, and they did not relish standing around in radioactive bilge water. It would not only do things to their legs but would also sterilize them. They were trying to get another boat and did seem too sanguine about the proposition. I did not tell them about the Principle of Uncertainty as they apparently had enough of that principle upon their hands already and could not use any more.
Atolls from the air are very lovely, The sea is blue and limitless. The islands are small and narrow and covered with palm trees. A strip of beach surrounds them, and the water off their shores is green—a clear, bright green. Some of the atolls do not quite reach to the surface and are just blobs of fine cool green in the deep blue of the Pacific. Atolls are also a cause of contention to scientists. One of them told me about it. I had made some small gambit remark to him about coral and the tiny animals that make it. “These atolls are not coral,” he said, “and the little animals did not make them.” If he expected me to rear back amazed, he lost. He didn't know about the chap who had rearranged my views on atoms. In fact, I am so conditioned now that if you tell me that the moon is not really made of green cheese, I will believe you. “Well,” I said, “what are they made of?” It seems that these Marshall Islands are about 90 percent rock., and the rock is formed by a plant. The rock looks a lot like coral to me, but then I am no expert. Anyway, the cause of contention is whether these islands are rising from the sea or sinking. There is a very simple way of finding out. You can take a drill and just dig down in them. If the rock goes below the level at which plant life does not go, the islands have been sinking; if the layer of rock is shallow, the islands were tossed up by some cataclysmic action and the plants took over from there. ‘Why didn't you bring a drill?” I asked. “The operation would have been too expensive, apparently,’ he said. I looked out over Bikin Lagoon at the mass of target ships and thought of their destruction, and I thought of the 42,000 men and all the numberless gadgets devised to make the test and the figure $70,000,000, which the show cost. “A very necessary economy,” I told him. After all, I am a taxpayer
People who could give accurate first hand information and the Principle of Uncertainty would be the residents of the Island of Bikini. There they were minding their own business in their primitive and unhealthy way when all of a sudden some men appeared and told them to move to another island. It was hard to explain to them that they were inhabiting the greatest experimental laboratory ever known. As it was, they didn't ask for explanation. They moved. They went to an island which is as much like theirs as your right thumb is like your left thumb, but they are not too happy. Home is home even on identical coral—pardon— rock atolls. These people have several outstanding things about them. They are peaceful, amiable, and utterly honest. They are unhealthy, being given to leprosy and yaws, among other ailments. Yaws is akin to syphilis, although it is not a venereal disease and is spread by flies. Leprosy is a result of dietary deficiency, and you don't have to worry about getting it if you have been eating right. The state of New York, for instance, does not segregate lepers. Dietary deficiency is right down the Marshall alley. Their main foods are tacca, a root, and breadfruit. Also fish. They do not cultivate anything. If it grows and is around, they eat it. If not, they don't do anything about it. Many of them have even abandoned fishing, as, during the Japanese occupation of these islands, they were well-fed. They rather look back on that food from the Japs; since we do not do too well by them, they have their reservations about us. Not much is known about the Marshall Islands and a whole nest of scientists sat in Bikini Lagoon and studied the flora and the fauna and anything else that caught their fancy. Around them stretched the ships; those to be sunk and those to be saved. “ How about the bomb?” I asked. My man shrugged his shoulders. He was not too interested in the bomb. He wanted to find a new species of seaweed or something.
In the middle of the target ships sat the battleship Nevada, painted red to stand out like a sore thumb for the benefit of the bombardier who was to plant the E=MC2 near it. As one looked down on the Lagoon and saw the vast array of ships, one thought; this is the biggest, damndiliest experiment ever performed. One thought of all the countless skills, both routine and esoteric, that have gone into shaping one quick, brief moment of turmoil. Here could be not only a physical moment but also a moment of great emotion. No conversation One sat in on, whether it was how the Phillies were making out in the National League of the nature of truth, had failed to swing around to the bomb. It was on men’s minds, not because it was going to be a great big blast in the middle of the Pacific, but because it would indeed mark the crossroads; political, economic, philosophical, scientific. That red ship shining in the sun below was ready to teach us and the world a lesson. Could we learn it? Men from newspapers ,magazines, and radio were to be grouped around when the bomb went off. It was for them to report on the immediate event, but it stretched out as an assignment with an end a long way off in history. Destiny had come to visible shape in the red battleship Nevada.’
Fashion note; the ladies of the Marshall Islands wear Mother Hubbards which are garments that cover them from neck to ankle. They even wear them in bathing. They are immoderately modest, and doctors, endeavoring to cure their ills, have difficulty persuading them to bare their bodies. Some missionaries from Boston Congregational churches went out to the Marshalls around 1850 and implanted in them the straight code of the Botson of that time. So there, in the Marshalls, one sat in the shadow of the future and looked back at Boston of the mid-nineteenth century. An aircraft carrier is an outlandish contrivance designed to carry aircraft over the high seas to places where they can do the most good. The whole thing is lopsided and looks highly improbable. On the Shangri-La, a man sat on the deck with a little box in front of him. This little box is somewhat smaller than a cigar box, and it has on it small levers that regulate the behavior of an airplane. They will lower the flaps, or speed the motor, or apply the brakes, or do the other things necessary to fly a plane. The box also has a small knob to control the plane in flight. All this is needed, since off the Shangri-La flew planes with no one in them. These are called drones. Each drone has a mother ship. The drone is catapulted off the deck of the carrier, and its mother ship takes over. The pilot has, on top of the stick with which he flies his own plane, a tiny little knob which he operates with his thumb. This knob will cause the drone to go up or down or bank to the right or left. The pilot does not have to straighten out his drone from a bank. He merely pushes a button on his stick with his middle finger, and that is that. The drone scurries off in level flight. It is to me an awesome sight when the drone catapults off the carrier. It takes to the air and the mother ship comes swooping by at a great rate. Then the ship takes over control of the drone, and the two of them hustle off together into the wild blue yonder. Later, the drones are set down on an island.
The Army drones operate only from land and are bigger and with a touch more fantasy to them. They have in them two television cameras. One is in the nose. The other peers at its own instrument board. The pilot of the mother ship has a television receiver in his plane. He either looks at the instrument board of his drone, or he switches to the nose camera and sees what the drone is seeing.
“You understand,” said the general, “that we no longer will build bombs to fit planes. We will build planes to fit bombs. And there will not be any one in them. And they will travel at great speeds. And the next war may last as long as forty minutes. And when it is over, there will be nothing left.” These flying, directed projectiles will, of course, have atom bombs in them.
The Shangri-La pushed through the night from the island of Roi to the vicinity of the island of Bikini. The bomb was to be dropped the next day. The preparations were over. The weather was coming up clear, which in itself was a bit of a miracle in those parts on that particular day. The next morning the bomb would drop and ?????? No one really knew. Between rumor, scientific fact, and scientific guesswork no one really could know. This was the first measured atomic explosion, and even the scientists bickered among themselves. For instance, they disputed on the question of how many times brighter and hotter than the sun would be the atomic explosion. If formulae failed to give a precise answer, what were the laymen involved in all this to expect?
The day was bright and clear. Over the horizon to the west was the island of Bikini. The drones took off; their mother ships hustled them away to their duty of flying through the atomic cloud. We stood on the sky deck of the carrier and waited while the minutes went along and the radio gabbledits static-laden messages. At one minute before the appointed time, we faced away and put our arms across our eyes to protect them. At bombs away, we waited for forty seconds to pass. They were a very long forty seconds. We were forty miles away and we did not expect to see more than a puff of smoke on the horizon. But then . . . it could be . . . nobody knows. . . . Someone shouted that the bomb had burst. We turned and saw a flash of orange light and our puff of smoke rose up. And then from the puff up went the cloud– a growing, live white thing. It went up and up to forty-five thousand feet, where it hung with its cauliflower top. Inside the creases, it glowed a peach color and it was fabulous and awful and beautiful. I hope I never see another one from whatever distance. I knew that what I had read was not hyperbole, that here indeed was man's destiny and that man had better not put this into the gamble of war.
Over the radio came a disappointed voice; “The fronds are still on the palm trees of Bikini—” There came the first sinful, dismal note of stupid hope that maybe the great radioactive cloud that stood over this man's head was not so much after all. A Honolulu paper said, some days later, that the bomb was an “awful flop.” The bombardier missed his target. The bomb was not so powerful as it was expected to be by the most conservative estimates. “The animals are still alive,” another man wrote. The same shabby hope.
The bomb was not expected to blow the palm fronds off the trees. The officers’ club, a flimsy building, was expected before the drop to be in business again a few days afterwards, right among those same palm trees. Most of the animals were not expected to die for weeks. The press was requested, not as a matter of censorship, but as American citizens, not to speculate on the size of the bomb. So a newsmagazine mentions “the six-foot bomb.” The newsmagazine knows as much about the size of that bomb as you and I do of the queer ichthyology of the Great Pacific deep.
These few remarks are not a quarrel with reporting that was bad, or stupid, or sinful, or whatever you want to call it. They are a warning to you not to let yourself be lulled. Keep in mind that one badly-aimed, weak atom bomb sank five ships to the bottom of Bikini Lagoon. That it damaged severely nine others. That, on most of the ships, it would have killed every man who was top side. Remember, that was just one bomb, as of 1946. Time brings improvements.