A Day of Clouds and Blackness

November 1, 1952.  Richard Garwin stood on the deck of the Navy destroyer, looking across the ocean between the ship and Enewetak Atoll.  The sun lay low on the horizon as Garwin’s team prepared to detonate the world’s first thermonuclear fusion bomb.  A device of Garwin’s own design, it would be the largest explosion in human history, harnessing the destructive forces of the sun.  As he listened to the countdown blaring through the ship’s PA system, he slipped on the goggles that he desperately hoped he would need.  The voice hit zero, and for a split second nothing happened.  In the next instant, a brilliant light that surpassed the sun’s radiance blinked soundlessly into existence above the island.  A massive fireball rose into the sky, and as the thunderous shockwave reached the ship he saw the top of the inferno begin to spread into the characteristic mushroom shape.  Garwin stood on the deck, continuing to watch as the cloud swelled, twenty miles across at the base and a hundred at the cap, twenty-five miles above his head.  As he marvelled at the ceiling beneath which he stood, sunlight slanting under the edge, Garwin listened to reports that were filtering in:  the island had been completely obliterated, and his mentor Edward Teller had radioed with news that the seismic shocks had been felt around the world.  Oppenheimer, his intellectual predecessor, had turned to the Hindu holy book to describe the Trinity test, but Garwin was reminded of a different passage referring to the “splendor of the Mighty One”:

“Before them the earth shakes,
the sky trembles,
the sun and moon are darkened,
and the stars no longer shine.”

Ivy Mike, the First Hydrogen Bomb

Sources:

The Cold War

The Plot Against America

The Bible