The lines ran down the tower and out through the desert to the control bunker. It was Hornig's sole means of communication with the outside world. The only other object in the tin shack, besides an atomic bomb, was a telephone. Or, as one Nobel Prize-winning scientist believed possible, it could set fire to the earth's atmosphere, in the process destroying all life on the planet. Or it could detonate with varying magnitudes of explosion. At the end of that time a number of different things could happen. McKibben would press a switch on a panel that in turn would close an automatic timing circuit and begin a forty-five-second countdown. In a few hours, a fellow scientist named Joe Mc-Kibben, standing in a concrete bunker exactly 10,000 yards to the south of this tower, would initiate the final act in what was almost certainly the biggest and most expensive scientific experiment in history. The wind rattled the thin walls of the bomb's cage. The rain pelted on the tin roof like a thousand hammer blows. The one thing nobody ever called it was what it actually was. They called it The Beast, The Gadget, The Thing, The Device. Perhaps in acknowledgment of its essence, its creators had even given it a name. A fantastic complex of cables sprouted from its sides like a spillage of guts or arteries, as if it were somehow not inert at all but actually organic, a growing, living, autonomous embryo, awaiting the moment of its birth. Even by day it would have looked ominous, but it looked especially so now with the wind whipping the tin walls, and the dim bulb swaying from the ceiling, and the lightning and thunder edging nearer. Hulking on a cradle was a metallic-gray, bloated, four-ton steel drum, and it took up almost every inch of space in the shack. There was a bare sixty-watt bulb hanging from the roof. A huge, dimly discernible shape crouched inside. Hornig stepped off the ladder beside it, pausing by the entrance. One of its walls was open to the elements. It was not much bigger than a garden shed. It was a flimsy, cheaply made structure, obviously not designed to last. They seemed a long way down.Īt the top of the tower, a simple corrugated tin shack rested on a square wooden platform.
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Once or twice he stopped, and he could see the guards below him looking up, like ants on the desert floor. It was slow going, but he was only twenty-four, and the long Sunday rides over the Pajarito mountain trails near Los Alamos kept him fit. Rung by rung, he pulled himself up the ladder. The wet steel slipped between his fingers and the rain stung his eyes, making it difficult to see. He did not want to think about what was at the top. By now the clouds were racing so low across the sky, he could barely see the top.
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The tower loomed 103 feet above Hornig's head, a network of black braces and girders reaching upward like a giant electric pylon. Flashes of lightning lit the San Andres mountains to the south, and the desert echoed with the growl of thunder. The storm that had been building throughout the day had finally erupted in all its fury.
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The wind and rain whipped through the steel latticework. Morris Jepson, weapons test officer on the Enola Gayĭon Hornig stared up at the tower. "Dutch" Van Kirk, navigator of the Enola Gay Stephen Walker, author of Shockwave BBC producer We talk to Walker, as well as two men who were aboard the Enola Gay on Aug. In a new book, Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, BBC producer Stephen Walker focuses on the three weeks that lead up to the attack and on the stories of individuals, policymakers, diplomats, physicists, soldiers, airmen and residents of Hiroshima. Bob Greene on 'The Man Who Won the War' June 6, 2000