FIRST ATOM BOMB

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 9, Issue 43, 12 February 1946, Page 6

FIRST ATOM BOMB

CRATER IN NEW MEXICO

“SOIL BOILED AND BUBBLED”

(From an eyewitness account in the “Christian Science. Monitor”)

The test atomic bomb crater in New Mexico is a saucer-sliapcd depression 25 feet deep and a liall'.mile across, where the top quarter-! inch .of red-grey soil boiled and bubbled.and then cooled into a canpet of jade and turquoise-coloured glass. This New Mexico bomb was big its effects comparable to the bombs dropped on Japan. The great jade saucer lies in the centre of a square of tall mountain ranges. It is smooth except at the centre where there is a small, sliallow bowl-shaped depression of redgrey earth where the boiling soil was blown completely away.

The central bowl is 500 ft. across. Out beyond the rim of the great jade saucer is a ring where the earth was wiped bare of vegetation. This mile-wide ring was the complete annihilation area. But beyond that signal wires five, feet above the ground vaporised, their stubby poles were knocked down and the low desert bushes still lean outward as if the great atomic wind were blowing them. This great crater is different from anything ever before observed. It was not made by gouging out and blowing away earth except right at the base where a few score barrels of dirt were, blasted out. This depression was made simply by pressure which pushed the.solid earth Straight down. The pressure is a secret, except for a official estimate that it was many million times the 14%1b. per square inch pressure of the atmosphere. The great bomb exploded only-100

feet above the earth here. The result was to make the crater soil temporarily radio-active. It was still emitting X-rays when an official inspection was made about mid-Sep-tember. To read the strength of these rays, natural - scientists carried instruments which gave readings showing the rays would not harm anyone remaining for perhaps hours. But they indicated that more than a month after the July 10 explosion the, raj r s were still strong enough to make spending a day and a night ill the crater a possibly risky business. The cameramen in the party were, warned that the mild ,rtiys| •were strong enough to fog plates and films if pictures were not taken rapidly. Before, lie entered, every man donned white canvas foot-bags shaped like shoes. This was to ensure that no grain of radio-active sand might cling to his shoes to remain for weeks after the expedition.

A subsequent ’plane view indicated that the crater, the country about which is closed by military guards 25 miles out, is disintegrating rapidly in the occasional rains. Already the dried beds of rivulets run down to the centre and cut crooked swathes in the carpet. They are destroying the amazing outer contours which from above look like a bursting spot of blue-green flame, frozen right at its peak,-with long, slender lingers, reaching out hundreds of yards. To avoid this gearing of the earth with X-ray radioactivity the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs Avere exploded far higher above the ground. Dr. J.. R. Oppenheimer, head of the secret laboratory in northern New Mexico, said the Japan heights of explosion—still secret —-were picked so that there would be no indirect chemical Avarfare due to poisoning the earth with radioactive elements, and no horrors other than the familiar ones due to any great explosion.