Posted on 07/15/2005 9:48:59 PM PDT by Tennessee_Bob
With this quote from the Bagavad-Gita, Oppenheimer summoned in the nuclear age at 5:30 in the morning at the Trinity Site in New Mexico.
The yield of code name Gadget was estimated to be equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT - 2,000 B-29s worth of explosives.
A quote from Brigadier General T.F. Farrell regarding the blast - "The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined..."
The light from the blast was seen all over New Mexico, and in parts of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico. Windows shattered 120 miles away in Silver City, New Mexico, and the shock wave was felt in Los Alamos, 230 miles away.
Why this post? I live in Oak Ridge, Tennessee - part of the Manhattan Project. I own a home built in 1944, for the workers at the Y-12, K-25, and X-10 facilities. I go to church with folks that as young men and women, came to this City Behind the Fence, to do their jobs - without an understanding as to what the end result would be - just the knowledge that it was part of the war effort. I make a point of thanking them for what they did - because even though they didn't carry weapons, or face the enemy - they helped to end the war.
amen! And God Bless men like Dr Teller who worked on it!
T+60 years bump...
Nah - haven't felt a need to do so. The lady who owned the house before me was a health physicist (from what I've read, the first female HP), and I'm sure if there was a concern, she had done so.
The house is pretty neat - it's cast concrete slabs and cinderblock. Sits on a concrete foundation, has a hot water (not steam) boiler and piping in the floor for heat during the winter, but no central air - big windows and fans. It's what's called a flat top - composite roof. A family room and master bedroom were added on to it approximately 35 years ago, that portion is standard frame construction, and has a gas furnace and air conditioner on it. Around a total of 1,700 square feet. They weren't built for comfort - in the original part of the structure, the largest of the three original bedrooms is probably 10x15 feet. The room that I use as my office - well, I couldn't put a queen size mattress in here - it would hit all the walls.
I have a unique take on this.
Within 15 years of the bombings, Japanese American relationships were amazingly good.
Do you think that if you'd told surviving Sailors from the Pearl Harbor attacks that they would have Children born in Japan and perhaps they would retire there? Would they have believed it?
I'm not saying it takes Nuclear war to bring about change, but I think that REAL change can happen in relatively short periods of time, and that is my hope for the current situation in the mid east.
Good show. I'm watching too.
This is good to brush up on, with China Saber rattling and whatnot.
Maybe that is why she moved.
Bump.
I am up too late, watching the History Channel right now. Earlier they had a brief program on the Trinity test.
Thanks for the thread. I have long found the story of the Manhattan Project fascinating.
And if I understand right, the next two bombs were used in japan and we were out of bombs for quite some time after that.
It took both bombs and another B-29 conventional bombing run (inadvertantly disrupted a coup to overthrow the emperor and keep fighting) to bring about the Japanese surrender.
BTTT
With this quote from the Bagavad-Gita, Oppenheimer summoned in the nuclear age at 5:30 in the morning at the Trinity Site in New Mexico.
The yield of code name Gadget was estimated to be equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT - 2,000 B-29s worth of explosives.
A quote from Brigadier General T.F. Farrell regarding the blast - "The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined..."
The light from the blast was seen all over New Mexico, and in parts of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico. Windows shattered 120 miles away in Silver City, New Mexico, and the shock wave was felt in Los Alamos, 230 miles away.
Why this post? I live in Oak Ridge, Tennessee - part of the Manhattan Project. I own a home built in 1944, for the workers at the Y-12, K-25, and X-10 facilities. I go to church with folks that as young men and women, came to this City Behind the Fence, to do their jobs - without an understanding as to what the end result would be - just the knowledge that it was part of the war effort. I make a point of thanking them for what they did - because even though they didn't carry weapons, or face the enemy - they helped to end the war.
It appears that the dirty work was done in NM, explosions, why do we care about Tenn.?
LOL!
Actually - she died here (just don't tell my daughter). She lived in the house for about 30 years. I'm pretty sure that if there was something wrong, she'd have known about it (I hope...).
Within 15 years of the bombings, Japanese American relationships were amazingly good.
Well that says to me that we should nuke mecca, medina, bagdad, kabul, palestine, jordan, syria, saudia arabia, and any other foolish arab-stupid country in the world, we might get good relations with them then.
I visited Trinity site a few years ago. A desolate patch of weeds beneath the Sierra Oscura range. A slightly depressed circular area a few hundred feet in diameter surrounded with cyclone fence accessible by an equally unremarkable military access road on the White Sands test range. Very little betrays the history there. All that remains are reinforcing steel in concrete from the original tower. And it was here where history pivoted on a knife's edge. It could have been Haigerloch Germany, or some small island held by the Imperial Japanese army for military research, but it wasn't. It was central New Mexico. It makes one very aware how precarious the trajectory of a free people can be. Protesters who whine about our own nuclear weapons arsenal never stop to think what the world would be like under the Swastika or Rising Sun. Never crosses their tiny minds.
Thanks for your post. These people (nuclear materials workers) are entitled to our acclaim. They finished the war and saved lives.
Because without Oak Ridge, Gadget would have been just a lot of high explosive. We're still cleaning up the dirty work here - sixty years after the fact.
Here's a couple links regarding Oak Ridge and what they did:
The Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association, Inc
Uranium and Plutonium Refinement in Oak Ridge
Wikipedia - Oak Ridge National Labs role in World War II
Wikipedia again - Oak Ridge, Tennessee
A good time line and explanation on the Manhattan Project
Exactly. I came face to face with a protestor (from out of town, of course) who bitched at me about the fact that we opened Pandora's Box. When I asked if he'd rather have had the Germans or the Japanese open that box, he replied that it never should have been opened. I tried to point out to him that the research was going on before the war broke out, in both countries, and still he stuck with "it shouldn't have been opened." I agree, to a degree - it was a terrible engine that was crafted - but I'm glad that it was dropped from a United States Army Air Corps B-29, instead a Nakajima or a Focke-Wulf.
Is it true that the editor of Scientific American figured out something was going on when he received so many subscriptions from Oak Ridge?
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