(See Cover)
For ages lost in the drifts of time, some of the most mysterious eyes on earth have stared cryptically toward tiny Bikini Atoll. On Easter Island, outrigger of the fleets of archipelagoes that ride the Pacific Ocean, a long file of stone colossi rear cold, immortal faces. No one knows what men carved these gigantic symbols, what hands, what primitive technology raised them, with what devotion or what fears. Whether they are gods or images of human greatness, they are menacing; they are monuments to the fact that man's history can perish utterly from the earth.
Of all strange things that the Easter Island idols have looked out upon through the ages, the strangest was preparing last week. A world, with the power of universal suicide at last within its grasp, was about to make its first scientific test of that power. During the earliest favorable weather after July 1, two atom bombs would be exploded at Bikini Island. The first bomb (and the fourth ever to be detonated anywhere) would be dropped on 75 obsolete warcraft anchored in the Bikini lagoon. About three weeks later, a second atom bomb would be exploded under the surface of the lagoon.
Tremor of Finality. "Operation Crossroads" (the irony of the name is intentional) had been ordered by the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, would be carried out under the command of Vice Admiral W.H.P. Blandy, Commander of the joint Army-Navy task force. Against the peaceful backdrop of palm frond and pandanus, on this most "backward" of islands, the most progressive of centuries would write in one blinding stroke of disintegration the inner meaning of technological civilization: all matter is speed and flame. Well might the stone giants embedded in the solid earth of Easter Island feel, in the far ripple of fission brought them by the waves, a tremor of finality.
On A-day the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, will take off from Kwajalein, 250 miles from Bikini. As it makes three trial runs over the orange-colored U.S.S. Nevada, takes readings of wind drift and adjusts the bomb sights, a loudspeaker will alert the whole area. Ten or more miles from the target, the operational ships will keep up steam in case the wind shifts. Aboard, some 40,000 men will lie down on the decks with their feet toward the blast and their eyes covered against blinding.
Then the Enola Gay will take off on its fourth and final run. The bomb bay will open. The bombardier, Major Harold Wood, before World War II a grocery clerk of Bordentown, N.J., will release the bomb.
The Genius. Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and hair like an aurora borealis. He is Professor Albert Einstein, author of the Theory of Special Relativity, the Unified Field Theory, and a decisive expansion of Max Planck's Quantum Theory, onetime director of Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Professor Emeritus at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, onetime Swiss citizen, onetime Enemy No.1 of Hitler's Third Reich, now a U.S. citizen.