Just before dawn on July 6, 1945, only a few clouds hung over the still New Mexico desert. The air possessed that lucid clarity which skews all sense of distance and space. Out on the desert stood several large towers, yet from the perspective of the blockhouse, where the observers anxiously waited, they appeared as little more than a few spikes stuck in the sand. Suddenly, one of the towers erupted into a brilliant fireball, searing the air and instantly replacing the dawn’s pastels with a blazing radiance. With the radiance came heat: an incredible, scorching heat that rolled outward in waves. Where seconds before the sand had stretched cool and level in every direction, now it fused into glass pellets. The concussion from the fireball completely vaporized the tower at its center, created a crater a quarter of a mile wide, and obliterated another forty-ton steel tower one-half mile away. Above the fireball an ominous cloud formed, shooting upward, outward, then back upon itself to form the shape of a mushroom, expanding until it had reached eight miles in the air. The effects of the fireball continued outward from its center: the light, followed by the waves of heat, and then the deadening roar of the concussion, sharp enough to break a window over 125 miles away. Light, heat, concussion—— but first and foremost, the brilliance of the light. At the edge of the desert a blind woman was facing the explosion. She saw the light. In the blockhouse at Alamogordo, where scientists watched, feelings of joy and relief were mixed with foreboding. The bomb had worked. Theory had been turned into practice. And devastating as the explosion appeared, the resulting fireball had not ignited the earth’s atmosphere, as some scientists had predicted. But the foreboding was impossible to shake. Humankind now had in its hands unprecedented power to destroy. General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atom bomb project, shared none of the scientists’ fears. Groves could barely contain his joy when he wired the news to President Harry Truman, who was meeting allied leaders at Potsdam outside the conquered city of Berlin. “The test was successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone,” reported Groves. Buoyed by the message, Truman returned to the conference a changed man. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill noticed the president’s sudden self-confidence. “He stood up to the Russians in a most decisive and emphatic manner,” Churchill remarked. “He told the Russians just where they got on and got off and generally bossed the whole meeting.” Since the British were partners on the bomb project, Churchill soon learned what had so lifted Truman’s spirits. Less than three weeks later, on August 6, 1945, a second mushroom cloud rose, this time above Hiroshima in Japan. That explosion destroyed an entire city, left almost 100,000 people dead and thousands more dying from radiation poisoning. Three days later another bomb leveled the city of Nagasaki. Only then did World War II come to an end, the bloodiest and most costly 1 James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, “The Decision to Drop the Bomb” Ch. 12 from James West Davison and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992), 275-302. 2 war in history. Ever since, the world has lived with the stark prospect that in anger or in error, some person, group, or government might again unleash the horror of atomic war. The New Mexico test of the first atom bomb marked the successful conclusion of the Manhattan Project, the code name for one of the largest scientific and industrial efforts ever undertaken. Between 1941 and 1945 the United States spent over $2 billion to build three atom bombs. Twenty years earlier that would have equaled the entire federal budget. The project required some thirty-seven factories and laboratories in nineteen states and Canada, employed more than 120,000 people, and monopolized many of the nation’s top scientists and engineers during a period when their skills were considered essential to national survival. Leading universities, as well as some of the nation’s largest corporations——Du Pont, Eastman Kodak, and General Electric——devoted substantial resources to the undertaking. Even before the Manhattan Project, physicists and other scientist’s had experienced the trend in modern industrial society toward ever more human work, creativity, and important decisions to take place from within large organizations. For much of the nineteenth century, scientists, like artists, worked alone or in small groups, using relatively simple equipment. Thomas Edison, however, led the way toward rationalized, business-oriented research and development, establishing his own “scientific” factory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. Like a manufacturer, Edison subdivided research tasks among inventors, engineers, and toolmakers. By the first decades of the twentieth century, Westinghouse, Du Pont, U.S. Rubber, and other major corporations had set up their own industrial labs. Then too, World War I demonstrated that organized, well-funded science could be vital to national security. During the war scientists joined in large research projects to develop new explosives, poison gases, optical glass for lenses, airplane instruments, and submarine detection devices. In less than two years, physicists and electrical engineers had doubled the advances of radio technology over the previous ten years. The government, for the first time, funded research on a large scale. But scientists were as much committed to the notion of laissez-faire as any conservative robber baron. They were suspicious of any “scheme in which any small group of men, appointed as a branch of the government, attempt to dominate and control the research of the country,” is one scientist put it. The end of the war halted government interference and financial support. Still, like most Americans, scientists shared in the prosperity of the 1920s. Economic boom meant increases in research budgets. Success in the laboratory attracted contributions from private foundations and wealthy individuals. American science began to produce both theoretical and applied results that rivaled the quality of science in Europe. The Depression of the 1930s forced researchers to tighten their belts and lower their expectations. The government, though seldom an important source of funding, drastically cut the budgets for its scientific bureaus. Even when the New Deal created jobs for scientists, it did so primarily to stimulate employment, not research. But by the late 1930s private foundations had resumed earlier levels of support. One of their most prominent beneficiaries was Ernest Lawrence, a physicist with a flair for showmanship who had established himself as the most famous, most funded, and most bureaucratically