The Day the Sun Rose Twice

Elizabeth Gist

(Published by Rushville Republican Newspaper)

   In August of 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that would change the course of history.
Einstein and several other scientists notified the President of Nazi efforts to purify uranium-235, in the hopes that it could be used to build an atomic bomb. The United States government wasted no time in beating Adolf Hitler and his evil regime to the punch and began "The Manhattan Project," with the sole focus a commitment to expediting research that would produce a viable atomic bomb.
   For the scientists involved, the most complicated issue to be addressed in making an atomic bomb was the production of ample amounts of "enriched" uranium to sustain a chain reaction. At the time, uranium-235 was very hard to extract. In fact, the ratio of conversion from uranium ore to uranium metal is 500:1. Compounding this, the one part of uranium that is finally refined from the ore is over 99 percent uranium-238, which is practically useless for an atomic bomb. To make the task even more difficult, the useful U-235 and nearly useless U-238 are isotopes, nearly identical in their chemical makeup. No ordinary chemical extraction method could separate them; only mechanical methods could work.
   A massive enrichment laboratory/plant was constructed at Oak Ridge, Tenn. Harold C. Urey and his colleagues at Columbia University devised an extraction system that worked on the principle of gaseous diffusion, and Ernest O. Lawrence (inventor of the Cyclotron) at the University of California in Berkeley implemented a process involving magnetic separation of the two isotopes. Next, a gas centrifuge was used to further separate the lighter U-235 from the heavier, non-fissionable U-238. Once all of these procedures had been completed, all that needed to be done was to put to the test the entire concept behind atomic fission (known as "splitting the atom").
   From 1939 to 1945, more than $2 billion was spent on the Manhattan Project. The formulas for refining uranium and putting together a working atomic bomb were created and seen to their logical ends by some of the greatest minds of our time. Chief among the people who unleashed the power of the atom was J. Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw the project from conception to completion.
Finally, the day came when all at Los Alamos would find out if "The Gadget" (code-named such during its development) was going to be the colossal dud of the century or perhaps an end to the war. It all came down to a fateful morning in midsummer, 1945.
   At 5:29:45 July 16, 1945, in a white blaze that stretched from the basin of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico to the still-dark skies, "The Gadget" ushered in the Atomic Age. The light of the explosion then turned orange as the atomic fireball began shooting upwards at 360 feet per second, reddening and pulsing as it cooled. The characteristic mushroom cloud of radioactive vapor materialized at 30,000 feet. Beneath the cloud, all that remained of the soil at the blast site were fragments of jade green radioactive glass created by the heat of the reaction. The brilliant light from the detonation pierced the early morning skies with such intensity that residents from a faraway neighboring community would swear that the sun came up twice that day. According to historical documentation, a blind girl saw the flash 120 miles away.
   Upon witnessing the explosion, its creators had mixed reactions. Isidor Rabi felt that the equilibrium in nature had been upset -- as if humankind had become a threat to the world it inhabited. J. Robert Oppenheimer, though ecstatic about the success of the project, quoted a remembered fragment from the Bhagavad Gita. "I am become Death," he said, "the destroyer of worlds." After viewing the results several participants signed petitions against loosing the monster they had created, but their protests fell on deaf ears.

   A little known fact: One of the state's most prolific surviving World War II soldiers lives right here in Rush County, and had a hand in defeating the Japanese and bringing down the Nazi regime in a way that will literally "blow" your mind.
   Don Miller, who grew up in Orange Township, was an "A" student all through his school years. He graduated from Milroy High School in 1941, and despite receiving a scholarship to Indiana University where his sweetheart Sue Wyman was attending, he chose Tri-State College in Angola, an electrical engineering school. War was declared Dec. 7, 1941, right in the midst of Miller's freshman year in which he was studying to be an engineer.
   "We all wondered how long it would be before we had to leave school and go fight," Miller said. "By joining the Army Reserves I was able to keep the Army away from me for another six months so that I could stay in school." Miller chose to join the Signal Corps so that he could continue to do electrical work. He was to head to Fort Monmouth, N.J. for military training. "I got on the train and it stopped in Cincinnati. The officers separated the train and half of us went east and half of us went south," Miller said. "Before I knew it, I was in Biloxi, Mississippi beginning training in the Air Corps."
   The Army literally lost Miller, and it took them months to locate him. He was not getting paid, his parents were worried that he had been kidnapped, and his fiancée' was convinced that the Nazis had gotten him. Eventually, the Army located him and asked him if he wanted to go back into the Signal Corps but Miller declined because he had already completed his basic training in the Air Corps.
   One day, Miller needed to speak with his captain. On the office wall, he noticed a sign that said "Join the ASTP and go back to college." Miller was intrigued. "I thought it was a very strange sign because it was so vague," he said. "What is ASTP? Well I later found out that it meant Army Specialized Training Program. I asked my captain what it was for and he said, 'Beats me. I don't understand it either, why they get you guys all trained and then they want you to go back to college.'"
   Further investigation into the program revealed that there would be a total of 15,000 ex-college students, now members of the Army, sent to 10 different colleges across the United States (1,500 students at each school). "Quite a few people in my corps signed up for the program because they were all ex-college students, and we were all shipped to the University of Alabama where we lived in a fraternity house with no furniture, sleeping on the floor. Magnificent. We didn't know why we were there. But I could smell big feet coming at me again, so I told them I was an expert typist, which I was, and they gave me a job typing."
   Miller selected Ohio State with 1,499 other individuals in the ASTP program, out of 10 other schools in the United States. He had originally wanted to attend Purdue University to be close to his sweetheart and his family, but program guidelines would not allow the soldiers to attend a university in their home state.
   "I went to Ohio State for a year, finished at the top of my class," Miller said. " I was picked out of the top six students because the other five were Jewish with relatives in concentration camps in Germany, and they were afraid that if those boys learned everything the Germans would try to blackmail them."
   Miller and his counterparts had to take an exam, which the Army used to find out what kind of people they were. It was, according to Miller, a stopping point to find out if they were the "right crew." For what, he didn't know. "Again, they put us on a train, and the train went south, and I thought, 'oh my God, they're going to take me to Biloxi again,'" Miller said. "It turned out that we went to a big construction area, which we later found out was called Oak Ridge, Tenn."
   Don and his fellow ASTP program members were not allowed to leave the barracks.
"Certain people were called out every morning, like 10 at a time, and they never seemed to come back," Miller recalled. "We didn't know what was going on, if they were going to shoot us or what, but they never came back. Finally, my name was called, and what they were doing was interviewing us to find out what our engineering specialty was, and then shipping us off accordingly. Mine was electrical, and chemists were what they were looking for at Oak Ridge, so they shipped me out again. I had no idea where I was going, but I got on a train with lots of other people and headed west—for three days."
   Miller and the other soldiers were finally allowed to open their orders, which told them to stay on the train until it stopped at Lamy, N.M., where they were to get off.
"Sure enough, I looked out one morning at dawn and the train had stopped," Miller said. "A big Army truck was waiting for us and loaded us up and they told us we were going to the city. What city we didn't know. They told us that we were going to "the hill," and gradually I picked up from others in the truck that we were going to a secret location known as Los Alamos."
Daylight had arrived and Don was exhausted. The Army truck passed through two iron gates, which sealed Los Alamos off from the rest of New Mexico.
   "We were told that everything we see here and hear here must stay here," Miller said. "I never got a letter I could read in the two years that I was there, because it was censored with scissors."
Students from the other 10 schools in the ASTP program were filtered into Los Alamos. "These were some high-level people," Miller said. "I felt like such a dummy with only two years of college, basically a B.S. degree, and here were graduates of UCLA and Yale and Harvard around me."
The interview process began again at Los Alamos.
   "They asked what area I wanted to work at, gave us a list of stuff we could do, and I said I wanted to work in he research lab," Miller said. "I was interviewed by a Nobel prize winner. A few days later I was issued a pass for the lab. Again, I still had no idea what I was going to do or what we were supposed to be working on." Miller was assigned a workbench and noticed that there were no tools present. He was instructed that he had to build his own test equipment.
   "I was assigned various things to work on," Miller said. "One thing I had to do was to test the similarity between spark plugs. They gave me two three-gallon buckets of Champion spark plugs and I had to see how many were just alike. "All of these things I worked with without knowing what I was going to do," Miller said. "One day I went to my boss and I said, 'What are we doing here?' He asked me if I studied physics and I said 'yes,' and he asked me what book I studied and I told him a book written by two authors, Hausman and Sachs."
   Miller's boss asked him if he recalled what the book said in the last chapter. "I told him I entered the Army before I got to the last chapter, so I didn't know," he said. "He told me to go to the library and read the last chapter, which I did." The last chapter told of an experiment in Italy that was conducted in 1939, four years prior, by a physicist by the name of Enrico Fermi, who had discovered that certain forms of uranium had isotopes that were unstable. These forms want to blow up and reduce themselves in weight and energy. The pile that Fermi put together would cause something called "fission," which was a process so powerful it would destroy cities as big as New York City. One blast. One bomb. No New York. Fermi proposed to build it and use it to end the war.
   Don Miller knew that he was taking part in something that was going to alter the course of World War II and the course of history forever. Don Miller headed for work every day at the research lab at Los Alamos, N.M. and spent his days testing spark plugs; it was months before he learned why. "I went to work one day and finally figured out that we were building a nuclear bomb," Miller said. "But that's about all I knew about it."
   It was 1944 and the war was getting worse. "We were just about to lose it," Miller said. "We went into Okinawa, supposed to take the city in one day and it took 30 days. We knew then that the U.S. could never invade Japan."
   According to Miller, it was then that the chemists at Oak Ridge concurred that the time had come to end the war, and they did a tremendous thing--introduced a new element to the mix. It was discovered that nuclear reactors produced a new, artificial element that fissioned even more readily than uranium: plutonium. In theory, an even more devastating weapon could be constructed from its isotope Pu-239, but plutonium was difficult and dangerous to handle and a plutonium bomb would require even more sophisticated engineering. Researchers realized that conducting further experiments and production in populated areas entailed serious physical as well as security risks, so the remote location in Los Alamos was selected to continue the process of developing "the bomb."
   In the spring of 1945 President Roosevelt died, and Los Alamos almost died with him. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein went to Washington D.C. to speak with his successor, Harry Truman.
   "He was smart, but didn't know what was going on," Miller recalled. "The three scientists briefed him on the bomb race. They said 'Mr. President, we have one more uranium bomb that we could detonate tomorrow. We have a possibility of building plutonium bombs if you give us a little time. Oak Ridge at this point had acquired enough plutonium to build more than three bombs. What do you want us to do?' Truman thought about it and said, 'Oh hell, drop the damn thing."
   Miller recalled an incident in a Santa Fe Hotel that would ultimately change his life. "We always had Military Police with us when we traveled out of Los Alamos, which was rarely, to make sure that we didn't talk," Miller said. "Me and a few of the other fellas sat up at the bar, and there were a few soldiers down at the other end. We had our patches on signifying that we were with the ASTP. My ears started burning, because I knew they were staring at us, but I just sipped my drink and ignored it."
   The soldiers at the other end of the bar began talking. "See those fellas down there?" one soldier asked his friend. "Yeah," his buddy said. "Well, they're from 'the hill'," the soldier said. "I hear they're going to test that gadget next month." Miller knew at that moment he had heard something he wasn't supposed to have heard. He and the group headed back to Los Alamos, but Don kept his mouth shut out of fear that the men at the other end of the bar were planted there by the military to see if he would talk.
   "I thought, 'You know? I bet I know something that even Dr. Oppenheimer doesn't know,'" Miller said. So the corporal headed straight for the man himself. Dr. Oppenheimer's secretary answered the door and asked how she could help Don. "I said, I have something that I think only I should tell the doctor, and I would like to see him privately. Out of curiosity, she went in and told him that there was someone outside that insisted on seeing him," Miller said. "He invited me in and told me to tell him my story, and so I did. He turned white, and said, 'Is that so?'"  Miller told Dr. Oppenheimer that he did not have to confirm or deny whether or not the rumor was true, but if it was correct, he wanted to head up his firing squad. And then he bowed out of the office.
   "I told no one but Oppie," Miller said. "I went downstairs with a clear conscience, and passed my boss's office on the way down. He asked me what I had talked to Oppenheimer about, and I told him that it was a secret between me and the doctor. He said, 'I know what you talked about. You want to get on that team, and I don't want you to be disappointed, but it's not going to happen.'"
   One week later, Miller received a call from Oppenheimer himself. "You're on," he told Miller. "You're on the team." It was May of 1945, and Don Miller had just been assigned to the firing squad for the testing of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M. "We were moved out to Trinity, which was the actual test site for the bomb," Miller said. "Our living conditions were pretty crummy. I don't think we had a drink of water the whole time we were at the Trinity Camp, just beer. There were no baths, no water—we were a mess. We'd work all day, do these tests day after day after day, and we'd go back to camp when the day was done and just loaf."
   The first test was done using the force of the blast of 500 pounds of dynamite, which was used to calibrate the tester's instruments. "We had no idea how strong the bomb would be," Miller said. "We just used all of our measurements from the 500 ton TNT pyramid." For the first 16 days in July, the group tested all day, every day with no mess-ups. They spent all night on July 15 setting up. But at 2 a.m. on July 16 it started to rain.
   "Some of the guys were saying that it was a sign that God didn't want us to do this," Miller said. "People were taking bets as to whether or not the atmosphere would explode when we dropped the thing." Miller was an amateur HAM radio operator at the time, a hobby he still enjoys today. During the war, the military was using frequencies that amateur radio operators would normally use. Miller picked a frequency that was quiet, because the testing group wanted to hear the airplanes and be able to talk to them. "I'd contact the airplane and get its location, and people like Oppenheimer would talk to the pilots. On one such frequency, we heard Col. Paul Tibbets give his location, confirm that he had located the target, and dropped the bomb."
    Miller and his colleagues had just heard a devastating blast, one so powerful that it turned the B-29 bomber upside down at 40,000 feet. After being released, it took about a minute for Little Boy to reach the point of explosion. Little Boy exploded at approximately 8:15 a.m. Aug. 6, 1945 (Japan Standard Time) when it reached an altitude of 2,000 ft above the building that is today called the "A-Bomb Dome."
   The people who saw the Little Boy often say, "We saw another sun in the sky when it exploded." The heat and the light generated by the Little Boy were far stronger than bombs which they had seen before. When the heat wave reached ground level it burnt all before it, including people. The strong wind generated by the bomb destroyed most of the houses and buildings within a 1.5 miles radius. When the wind reached the mountains, it was reflected and again hit the people in the city center, which generated the most serious damage to Hiroshima and the people there.
The radiation generated by the bomb caused long-term problems to those affected. Many people died within the first few months and many more in subsequent years because of radiation exposure. Some people had genetic problems which sometimes resulted in having malformed babies or being unable to have children.
   It is believed that more than 140,000 people died by the end of the year. They were citizens including students, soldiers and Koreans who worked in factories within the city. The total number of people who have died due to the bomb is estimated to be 200,000. For the testers, Little Boy, as the bomb dropped over Hiroshima was called, worked as it should have. So who tested "Fat Man?"
   "Nobody," Miller said. "It was never tested." The bomb was transported in a lead suitcase with the key scientists who took it to Tinian Island. The explosive lenses, required to make the bomb work as it should, were shipped separately on the U.S.S. Indianapolis. The sinking of this ship was one of the biggest scandals of World War II, but important to this phase of history. The ship had just dropped off the lenses on Tinian when it ran into a water mine or a Japanese ship.
   Just three days after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima the second atomic bomb, called Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki. Though the amount of energy generated by the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was significantly larger than that of Little Boy, the damage done to the city was slighter than that done to Hiroshima due to the geographic structure of the city. It is estimated that approximately 70,000 people died by the end of the year because of the bombing.
   The Armistice came shortly after. General Douglas MacArthur accepted the surrender and Los Alamos became a ghost town. "There was nothing to do, no more war to fight. I just thought they would discharge us, hopefully in time for college to start," Miller said. "Everyone I knew at Los Alamos had a Ph.D. and I figured I'd starve to death if I didn't get one too."
   September 1, the first day of classes at the University of Illinois, which Miller had chosen to attend, came and went, and he still had not been discharged. "I just gave up," he said. "And since I knew I wasn't going to get home to go to school, I organized my own college." With some of the greatest scientific minds in history all around him and his colleagues, Miller set up a school. He even served as Enrico Fermi's paper grader.
   By February, the makeshift collegiate courses had ended, and Miller was at a stand-still. As a final duty in World War II, he talked Oppenheimer into discharging him and making him a civilian, on the condition that he go with a group to Bikini Island to detonate the final three test bombs in an underground volcano. Oppenheimer offered Miller $1,000 a month for this final service, and the corporal, who at the height of his Army service had been making $78 a month, was happy to take it.  "I said, 'You've got yourself a Bikini traveler, but I have to go home and marry my sweetheart first,'" Miller said.