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Christmas Island's Scientific Director Ogle is one of a strange breed of professional weapons testers who have traveled the atomic route in the conviction that what they are doing will make the U.S. stronger. They are fascinated by their wondrous weapons, whose forces even they do not fully understand. Another such tester, Physicist Walter Goad Jr. of the University of California's Scientific Laboratory at Los Alamos, puts their view simply: "Everyone here recognizes that these weapons are terribly destructive and that we don't know what will ultimately happen. But we feel that in a world of so much force, we have to be able to do as well as anybody else." "We Puny Things." In the predawn darkness of July 16, 1945, dance music echoed from loudspeakers as men smeared their faces with sunburn cream and waited ten miles from a 100-ft. tower in the desert near Alamogordo. Some had been working and waiting three years for this moment—and when that tower ignited at 5:30 a.m. in the world's first atomic explosion, the flash was so blinding that those who looked directly at it, even with dark glasses, never really saw it. General Francis Farrell, one of the military supervisors, told of his feelings: "Thirty seconds after the explosion came, first, the air blast pressing hard against the people, followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty." Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the creation of this weapon at the Los Alamos lab, was reminded of a passage from the Hindus' sacred Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One."
Also watching from a mountainside that morning was Los Alamos Physicist Ogle, barely a year past his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. Though his role was minor, he had caught the fever of the race to make the bomb.
J-7. After the war, many scientists, appalled at the human toll their work had taken in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deserted the field of nuclear-weapons development. Ogle was not one of them. Says he of the wartime deaths the bombs had caused: "Our purpose was to do just that." Congress placed atomic development under a newly created, civilian-controlled Atomic Energy Commission in the hope that its pursuits would be mainly peaceful. Yet some scientists were already warning that the U.S. atomic monopoly could not long be maintained, that the Russians were making progress. A far-sighted AEC commissioner. Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, argued for a high-altitude patrol and seismographic network to detect Russian atomic explosions when and if they came. But AEC's idealistic first chairman, David Lilienthal, decided it was not needed. Finally, aroused by Strauss, the Pentagon picked up the tab, got AEC to furnish the technical knowledge to set up a rudimentary net.