Those poor little people

The regrets, and triumphs, of Robert Oppenheimer, scientist who ushered in nuclear age

- MATT ROPER

WAITING in the control bunker in the early hours of July 16, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer grew increasingly tense as the final minutes ticked down to the moment that would change the world. Then, at precisely 5.30am, he pressed the button.

It was the first-ever nuclear explosion, and even Oppenheimer admitted nobody really knew for sure what would happen when the atomic bomb he called the Gadget went off six miles away in the New Mexico desert.

The scientist, who had developed the first atomic bomb, had warned of three possible outcomes that it would be a dud, that it would be far more powerful than expected and blow everyone to bits, or that it would be a success, with or without some loss of life.

The explosion outshone the sun and created a shockwave felt 100 miles away. The 100ft firing tower was instantly vaporised, while the asphalt around it was turned to green sand.

As the orange-and-yellow fireball stretched up and spread, a second column rose and flattened into a mushroom shape, the enduring image of the new atomic age.

Oppenheimer whose life has now been turned into a Hollywood movie starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Robert Downey Jr - later claimed that, in the moments after the detonation, he recited a line from Hindu scripture in his mind: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

But according to another theoretical physicist, Jeremy Bernstein, who worked with Oppenheimer, the first words to come out of his mouth were the much more prosaic: "I guess it worked."

Weeks later, on August 6 and 9 1945, the Gadget was dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 214,000 people in seconds and bringing the Second World War to an end.

Those who had spent 27 months with the scientist at the Los Alamos lab secretly developing the bomb remembered how his nervousness had turned to "tremendous relief" after the test.