The Atomic Bomb From Both Ends: Los Alamos, the Trinity Test and Hiroshima

Enrico Fermi was about ten miles from the blast when the first atomic device went off at Trinity, New Mexico, at about 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945. About 40 seconds later the air blast reached him. He had been dropping small pieces of paper from about six feet up; when the blast passed, it pushed them about 2½ meters, which he estimated matched the blast of ten thousand tons of TNT. Three weeks later, an atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. A National Park Service lesson for Los Alamos County — an American World War II Heritage City — asks students to hold both of those moments in mind at once.

Los Alamos and Trinity

Los Alamos County was a site of development and final testing for the Manhattan Project's atomic bomb. The Trinity test took place on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, 200 miles from the laboratory.

Fermi's own account, declassified in full only in 1981, describes it: "My first impression of the explosion was the very intense flash of light, and heat on the parts of my body that were exposed... I had the impression that suddenly the countryside became brighter than in full daylight." He watched through dark welding glass as a flame rose and became "a huge pillar of smoke with an expanded head like a gigantic mushroom," probably to about 30,000 feet.

The scientists' view

On August 17, 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 41-year-old director of the Los Alamos project, told an Associated Press reporter he had been a little scared of what they had made, but that science could not hold back progress for fear of what the world might do with it. Making bombs in wartime had been necessary, he said; in peacetime the discovery could bring lasting benefits, and used wisely by statesmen it might even reduce the chance of future war.

The physicist Joan Hinton, who worked on nuclear reactors at Los Alamos, disobeyed precautions to watch Trinity with a colleague from a hill only about 25 miles away. A modern poem by John Canaday imagines that moment through her eyes: a vast, silent eruption, and everything stopping.

The view from Hiroshima

The poet Tōge Sankichi was more than three kilometers from ground zero when the bomb fell on the morning of August 6, 1945. He suffered cuts from flying glass and months of radiation sickness. Most people within about two kilometers of the center died — from shock and fire, in the blast, or of burns within a week — and many farther out died within months. In Poems of the Atomic Bomb, finished in 1952, he wrote of ordinary people setting out to work and school that morning. His poem "When Will It Be That Day?" argues that the bomb was dropped in haste, before the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan.

Sadako Sasaki was two years old and at home in Hiroshima that day. She survived, but died of leukemia ten years later, in 1955. Japanese folklore says a crane lives a thousand years, and that folding a thousand origami cranes grants a wish; Sadako folded 1,300 before her death.

For teachers

The lesson's essential question: How did the perspectives of those who created the atomic bomb compare with the perspectives of those who experienced its devastating impact? Its sources are an August 17, 1945 newspaper interview with Oppenheimer, Canaday's poem "Joan Hinton at Trinity," and an excerpt from Tōge Sankichi's afterword and poem, with Fermi's account and Sadako's story as extensions. Students consider why July 16 might be called a watershed moment, and whether they agree that a scientist cannot hold back progress for fear of its uses.

Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: Historical Perspectives on the Atomic Bomb created at Los Alamos, Los Alamos County, New Mexico, WWII Heritage City," by Sarah Nestor Lane for the National Park Service's Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education, funded through the National Council on Public History's cooperative agreement with the NPS; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The lesson's readings — John B. Curtis's Associated Press article (News-Pilot, San Pedro, August 17, 1945), John Canaday's Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) and Tōge Sankichi's Poems of the Atomic Bomb, translated by Karen Thornber (University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies) — are summarized here, not reproduced. Fermi's report, "My Observations During the Explosion at Trinity on July 16, 1945," is a U.S. government document.