The Terrible Thing We Made

On July 16,1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Richard Feynman, was a young physicist then and a participant in the top secret Manhattan Project that developed the bomb at Los Alamos. He observed the effects of the explosion from a distance of twenty miles: A tremendously bright flash lit up in the sky, which changed from yellow to orange. This was followed. he says, after about a minute and a half, by an enermous Bang and a long thunderous rumble. The birth of the Bomb was celebrated euphorically by the participants of the Manhattan Project. Yet not everyone was happy. The physicist Robert Wilson, for example, moped about it. "It's a terrible thing we made", he lamented. Shortly after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Feynman sat in a New York restaurant and thought about the radius of damage, the destruction of the Japanese cities, and how far from there was 34th street? And then he watched people building a new road, or a bridge, and he thought: "They don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless."