WORLD WAR II AND THE BOMB The United States and its allies including the employed a huge workforce and found the United Kingdom France the Soviet Union greatest scientific geniuses to create the and China were at war against the Axis atomic bomb first powers of Germany and Japan The Axis On April 30 1945 German dictator Adolf powers had dreams of world domination Hitler committed suicide as Allied troops Something had to be done to stop them and War IIl on closed in His suicide ended World end the worldwide war which began in 1939 the European front The Japanese continued The Germans were close to mastering battling though The United States decided nuclear fission in atomic bombs In response to use the atomic bomb on Japan in hopes of the United States spent billions of dollars shocking the country into surrender Bainbridge's job was to prepare the site for the test Starting in February 1945 he and his staff of 25 laborers worked toward their July 4 target test date The US Army transformed a house on the site into a field laboratory The staff grew to more than 250 workers many of whom were soldiers The US Army Corps of Engineers built three dirt covered bunkers with concrete slab roofs They were 10 000 yards 9 100 m from Ground Zero where the bomb would explode Each bunker was named after its direction and distance in yards from Ground Zero Bunker N 10 000 to the north housed recording instruments and searchlights Bunker W 10 000 to the west housed banks of high speed cameras and searchlights And bunker S 10 000 to the south served as the command center Another 5 miles 8 km to the south was the base camp It had the workers tents and barracks The laborers built a steel tower at Ground Zero They poured four concrete footings into the sand They built the legs from prefabricated steel that had 10
The atomic bomb was developed inside the Los Alamos Laboratory in New
been shipped to the site The finished tower was 100 feet 30 5 m tall with an oak platform on top A small three sided corrugated iron shack sat at the top to house the bomb A heavy duty electric winch a lifting device could pull the bomb up and through the removable floor of the shack More than 500 miles 800 km of wires radiated from the bomb to instruments inside designated bunkers Some wires CONSTRUCTION WORKERS hung from T shaped wooden poles that The men who worked on the Trinity site labored around the clock to get the job done The were 6 feet 1 8 m tall while others ran daytime desert temperatures reached more than through garden hoses buried underground 100 degrees Fahrenheit 38°C Every morning the men made sure to shake their boots out BUILDING THE GADGET in case a scorpion centipede rattlesnake or At the Los Alamos laboratory tension was fire ant was inside They could take only cold showers in the gypsum tainted well water The building Harry S Truman who became chalky water made their hair stiff If they drank US president when Franklin Roosevelt the water it made them sick died on April 12 1945 was scheduled to attend the Potsdam Conference It was being held outside Berlin Germany from July 15 to August 2 1945 World leaders gathered to negotiate terms for the end of the war Truman wanted the Trinity test to happen during that conference so that he could inform British prime minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin Oppenheimer felt the pressure more than anyone He and his team were building the gadget as fast as possible But a new crisis came up every day with the complex device His team worked through many nights to complete the
project The team worked on two bombs one was uranium based and the other was plutonium based Both used fission to create the nuclear explosion Inside the uranium gadget a gun firing mechanism would shoot one piece of U 235 uranium at another piece But U 235 is a very rare element in nature It took almost one year for scientists to separate the atoms of U 235 from the more common U 238 atoms to make one bomb The other type of gadget used man made radioactive plutonium as its fuel But a gun firing mechanism wouldn't work to start the plutonium reaction After months of experimentation the Los Alamos scientists decided to use implosion to fire the plutonium bomb A orange sized ball or core of plutonium had explosives surrounding it When the explosives went off they would blast the plutonium together creating a chain reaction that could cause an atomic explosion The scientists had plenty of plutonium for a test bomb SETTING UP THE BOMB On July 12 the plutonium core was removed from the Los Alamos vault At approximately 6 00 p m the core arrived at the Trinity test site ranch house for the night The giant implosion explosive casting or shell consisting of the melted and cooled explosive material in its container left Los Alamos on July 13 at 12 01 a m for an eight hour trip to the test site A room inside the ranch house was converted into a clean room It was thoroughly vacuumed and the windows were sealed with black electrical tape Early in the morning on July 13 the assembly team gathered around the bomb components spread out on a table They put together the plutonium core and packaged it for its trip to Ground
