Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

(serial number 62-0006): Cited in “Witness Group Final Report,” p. 1.

You and the Titan II: Ibid., p. 11.

an “explosive situation”: Ibid., p. 4.

Gary Lay insisted that nobody had been welding: See Linda Hicks, “Silo Survivor Tells His Story,” Searcy Daily Citizen , May 7, 2000.

the launch checklist went something like this: I have presented a somewhat abbreviated version of the checklist. For the complete one, see Technical Manual, USAF Model LGM-25C, Missile System Operation (Tucson: Arizona Aerospace Foundation, 2005). fig. 3–1, sheets 1–3.

The missile’s serial number was 62-0006: See “Titan II Class A Mishap Report, Serial Number 62-0006, 18 September 1980, Damascus Arkansas,” Eighth Air Force Mishap Investigation Board, October 30, 1980, p. 0–1.

“Dang,” Holder thought: Holder interview.

Sergeant Herbert M. Lehr had just arrived: Interview with Herbert M. Lehr. I am grateful to Lehr for describing that historic day in New Mexico. His memory, at the age of ninety, seemed better than mine. An account of Lehr’s work for the Manhattan Project can be found at the Library of Congress: Herbert Lehr Collection (AFC/2001/001/12058), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center.

the most expensive weapon ever built: By the end of 1945, about $1.9 billion had been spent on the Manhattan Project — roughly $24.7 billion in today’s dollars. See Richard G. Hewlett, and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume 1, 1939–1946 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), p. 723.

Ramsey bet the device would be a dud: For the yield predictions made by Ramsey, Oppenheimer, Teller, and other Manhattan Project scientists, see Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 657.

odds of the atmosphere’s catching fire were about one in ten: According to the physicist Victor Weisskopf, a fear that the atmosphere might ignite caused one of his colleagues at Los Alamos to have a nervous breakdown. See the interview with Weisskopf in Denis Brian, The Voice of Genius: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 74–75.

“tickling the dragon’s tail”: For the origins of the term, see Lillian Hoddeson, Paul W. Henriksen, Roger A. Meade, and Catherine Westfall, Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 346–48. For a firsthand account of the dangerous experiments, see Frederic de Hoffmann, “‘All in Our Time’: Pure Science in the Service of Wartime Technology,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , January 1975, pp. 41–44.

“So I took this heavy ball in my hand”: Quoted in James P. Delgado, Nuclear Dawn: From the Manhattan Project to the Bikini Atoll (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2009), p. 59.

the “ultimate explosive”: H. G. Wells, The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1914), p. 117.

“carry about in a handbag”: Ibid., p. 118.

“The catastrophe of the atomic bombs”: Ibid., p. 254. Wells was an early proponent of world government, and his complex, often contradictory views on the subject are explored in Edward Mead Earle, “H. G. Wells, British Patriot in Search of a World State,” World Politics , vol. 2, no. 2 (January 1950), pp. 181–208.

“it may become possible”: The full text of the letter, as well as Roosevelt’s response to it, can be found in Cynthia C. Kelly, ed., The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007), pp. 42–44.

“extremely powerful bombs of a new type”: Ibid., p. 43.

Conventional explosives, like TNT: I am grateful to members of the New York Police Department Bomb Squad not only for teaching me how high explosives work but also for demonstrating some of them for me in the field. See Eric Schlosser, “The Bomb Squad,” Atlantic Monthly , January 1994.

similar to the burning of a log in a fireplace: Ibid.

temperatures reach as high as 9,000 degrees: Cited in Samuel Glasstone, ed., The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), p. 29. Glasstone’s book does an unsurpassed job of explaining what nuclear weapons can do. The original edition appeared in 1950, the last edition in 1977 — and the one cited here comes with a round, plastic “nuclear effects computer,” similar to a slide rule, that allows you to calculate the maximum overpressures, wind speeds, and arrival times of various nuclear blasts, depending on how far you’re standing from them.

1.4 million pounds per square inch: Cited in Schlosser, “The Bomb Squad.”

tens of millions degrees Fahrenheit: See Glasstone, Effects of Nuclear Weapons , p. 24.

many millions of pounds per square inch: Ibid., p. 29.

the largest building in the world: Cited in Michael Kort, The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 22.

“the Introvert”: See Hoddeson et al., Critical Assembly , p. 86.

“The more neutrons — the more fission”: “Survey of Weapon Development and Technology” (WR708), Sandia National Laboratories, Corporate Training and Development, February 1998 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), p. 112.

“We care about neutrons!”: Ibid.

“precision devices”: For Kistiakowsky’s thinking about how to create a symmetrical implosion, see George B. Kistiakowsky, “Reminiscences of Wartime Los Alamos,” in Lawrence Badash, Joseph O. Hirschfelder, and Herbert P. Broida, eds., Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943–1945 (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing, 1980), pp. 49–65. The reference to precision devices appears on page 54.

the exploding-bridgewire detonator: For the story behind the invention of this revolutionary new detonator, see Luis W. Alvarez, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 132–36. For a brief overview of the technology, see Ron Varesh, “Electric Detonators: Electric Bridgewire Detonators and Exploding Foil Initiators,” Propellants, Explosives, Pyrotechnics, vol. 21 (1996), pp. 150–54.

Hornig was instructed to “babysit the bomb”: Cited in Donald Hornig and Robert Cahn, “Atom-Bomb Scientist Tells His Story,” Christian Science Monitor , July 11, 1995. For more details of that night atop the tower, see also “60th Anniversary of Trinity: First Manmade Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945,” Public Symposium, National Academy of Sciences, July 14, 2005, pp. 27–28; and “Babysitting the Bomb: Interview with Don Hornig,” in Kelly, Manhattan Project , pp. 298–99.

This is what the end of the world will look like: See James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 234.

[ Weisskopf] thought that his calculations were wrong: See Brain, Voice of Genius , p. 75.

“The hills were bathed in brilliant light”: See O. R. Frisch, “Eyewitness Account of ‘Trinity’ Test, July 1945,” in Philip L. Cantelon, Richard G. Hewlett, and Robert C. Williams, eds., The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 50.