The Making Of the Bombs

 

“Most of us have seen photos of the first atomic blasts -- the ever-expanding mushroom clouds, the fireballs, the vast devastation -- that would end World War II and forever change our lives. In "Trinity" (Chicago, 344 pages, $39), Emily Seyl takes us back to the final months of testing, in the high desert of New Mexico, as the theories of the Manhattan Project became reality.

 

Ms. Seyl is a writer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where some of the atomic work took place. "According to its basic design," she writes of the bomb, "a small, central sphere of fissile material would be compressed by a much larger, outer sphere of conventional explosives to form a supercritical mass at the device's core, generating a nuclear explosion." Most of the technical details surrounding the test have been "well documented," we are told, but as for the test site itself, "the look and feel of Trinity as a makeshift laboratory and bustling desert community inevitably began to fade" after the end of the project.

 

The book fills in some of that fading history. In addition to diagrams, blueprints and construction photos, Ms. Seyl shows us the day-to-day lives of the workers who had to leave their families, some for months at a time, to work on a secret project that many initially knew little about.

 

The book includes photos of makeshift camps, barracks, latrines and other infrastructure, including the photography bunkers from which images of the explosion would be taken. There are black-and-white photos of the Hill, the residential complex that many of the project's scientists called home, as well as one of the "Straight Length Banded Accumulator," the containment vessel inside of which the first atomic explosion would take place.

 

As with any scientific experiment, there had to be painstaking observations and measurements. Photos show the construction of observation huts to the north, south and west of the blast site, some 10,000 yards -- about 5 1/2 miles -- away. "The shelters were fashioned from sturdy timbers supporting concrete slab roofs," Ms. Seyl writes, "with the blast-facing side of each shelter buried under a mound of earth and beams along the opposite wall bracing against the sand fill."

 

Along with successes came not so much failures as experiments that didn't achieve the desired results. A Herculean effort went into transporting Jumbo -- the nearly 500,000-pound container vessel intended for the test explosion -- from Ohio to New Mexico, where it went unused for fear that its size and density would skew the data from the detonation. "The vessel was placed not at ground zero but 800 yards to the northwest, joining a ring of some of the closest-range instrument bunkers." If the test fizzled, "the weighty investment in failure would loom quietly from the sidelines as history unfolded around it."

 

Most of the scientific work at Trinity was directed to the Gadget -- the codename for the atomic bomb itself. The book includes numerous photos of the Gadget in its final form, as well as a diagram of what scientists thought the mushroom cloud would look like. One fascinating sequence of photos records the actual detonation on July 16, 1945.

 

After this successful test, the Gadget was succeeded by Fat Man and Little Boy, the two bombs dropped over Japan.

 

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Mark Yost writes about military history for the Journal.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: The Making Of the Bombs. Yost, Mark.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 08 Aug 2026: C9.