To Trinity and Beyond (chapter one: The World Set Free)

(A re-run from January...)

A Mudville graphic novel blending non-fiction and fiction (until the distinction blurs)...

...And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow to the heart of the Central European hosts... The face of the adventurer at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action.

- H.G. Wells, The World Set Free, written 1913

On July 17 [1945] world-shaking news had arrived. In the afternoon Stimson called at my abode and laid before me a sheet on which was written, "Babies satisfactorily born." By his manner I saw something extraordinary had happened. "It means," he said, "that the experiment in the Mexican desert has come off. The atomic bomb is a reality."

- Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy
(The Second World War, Volume 6) 1953

The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descending column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways and the steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great banking curves for a balance. The gaunt man clung tight with hand and knees; his nostrils dilated, his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly strapped.... When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation.

- Wells, The World Set Free

No responsible scientist would predict what would happen when the first full-scale atomic explosion was tried. Were those bombs useless or were they annihilating? Now we knew. The "babies" had been "satisfactorily born".

- Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy

THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in 1914 ... under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person in the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. ... in the particular case of The World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding the Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy.

- Wells, preface to 1921 edition of
The World Set Free

The President [Truman] invited me to confer with him forthwith... A more intricate question was what to tell Stalin... "I think," [Truman] said, "I had best just tell him after one of our meetings..."

- Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy

Hitler had lost the advantage of a first crack at the secret of uranium through not taking precautions. Dr. Hahn, the first man to break open the uranium atom, was a German. But one of his laboratory assistants had fled Germany to escape a pogrom. She came to this country, and told us about it.

We were searching, there in the laboratory in Maryland, for a way to use U235 in a controlled explosion. We had a vision of a one-ton bomb that would be a whole air raid in itself, a single explosion that would flatten out an entire industrial center. Dr. Ridpath, of Continental Tech, claimed that he could build such a bomb, but that he could not guarantee that it would not explode as soon as it was loaded and as for the force of the explosion--well, he did not believe his own figures; they ran out to too many ciphers.

- Robert Heinlein (as Anson MacDonald),
Solution Unsatisfactory, Astounding Science Fiction, May, 1941

That July 24, at the last Big Three conference in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, Truman, exultant at Grove's awesome description of the Trinity test, had approached Stalin with contrived casualness as the Soviet dictator was leaving the conference room. Truman said that the United States "had a new weapon of unusual destructive force." Stalin had simply nodded his thanks and left the room. Truman and Churchill decided that Stalin had not understood. They were wrong.

Stalin was well briefed on the Manhattan Project. The latest yield of Soviet espionage, a memorandum he had apparently received a couple weeks before, had informed him, among other things, that the Trinity test was imminent.

- Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon, 2009

U-235 has been separated in quantity easily sufficient for preliminary atomic-power research, and the like. They got it out of uranium ores by new atomic isotope separation methods; they now have quantities measured in pounds. By 'they,' I mean Seilla research scientists. But they have NOT brought the whole amount together, or any major portion of it. Because they are not at all sure that, once started, it would stop before all of it had been consumed-in something like one micromicrosecond of time.
<...>
Two cast-iron hemispheres, clamped over the orange segments of cadmium alloy. And the fuse-I see it is in-a tiny can of cadmium in a beryllium holder and a small explosive powerful enough to shatter the cadmium walls. Then-correct me if I'm wrong, will you?-the powdered uranium oxide runs together in the central cavity. The radium shoots neutrons into this mass-and the U-235 takes over from there.

- Cleve Cartmill, Deadline, Astounding Science Fiction, March 1944

Soviet intelligence had thoroughly penetrated the Manhattan Project. The gumshoes in the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps, fixated on the left-wing connections of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was in charge of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bomb was built, and those of several other scientists, never suspected the real spies...

- Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

(Here)