The Green Glass Sea

“Manhattan Project” was the code name given to the United States’ research and development around the use of the ground-breaking nuclear fission process for military purposes. It was known that German scientists were also working on this problem, which created significant pressure, as Germany and America were at war after the United States entered the war in 1941 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. English and Canadian scientists were also working on the problem.

In 1943, an ultra-secret laboratory headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer was established on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico, 34 miles north of Santa Fe. Scientists involved in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos were trying to work out how fissionable material could be brought together to achieve supercritical mass, which would generate an explosion. The scientists also had to work out how this process could be contained within a deliverable weapon and fused to detonate at the exact moment the bomb was above a target. The work was complicated by the difficulty in sourcing adequate amounts of plutonium-239, which was a necessary element in the fission process.

On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear bomb created at Los Alamos was tested in an isolated stretch of desert, which was part of the Alamogordo Air Space. The explosion constituted a burst of bright light, a wave of heat, and a roar of sound and energy. The immense power of the explosion liquidated the steel tower that the “gadget”—the name of the first bomb—had been sitting on, as well as fusing the surrounding desert sand into glass.

Intent on protecting the secrecy of the project, the military issued a statement that the blast had been caused by an ammunition dump explosion; this was the story circulated by the press, although people later realized what the explosion had been after the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki (“Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Britannica, 2023).