The First Atomic Bomb: A True Tale (March, 1984)
------------------------------------------------

     This story was originally related by Laura Fermi, widow of the nuclear
physicist Enrico Fermi who, along with assorted colleagues, participated in the
first test bomb in the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early
morning hours of a summer day in July 1945. 

     When the date had been established for the secret test, staff members from
the Manhattan Project (as the secret test was known) were invited to bring their
spouses to New Mexico to watch the results of the several years of research. 
Each staff member had been assigned specific tasks to handle while there. 
Generally, they acted as observers and were stationed in a circle around the 
perimeter of the bomb site.  Enrico and Laura were stationed in an area about 
twenty miles to the southwest of the bomb site. 

     The morning came when the bomb was scheduled to be detonated in the test.
Laura told it like this...

     Enrico and I woke up at 3:00 a.m., to go to the site. The test was 
scheduled for 4:30 a.m. that day, which was July 19, 1945. We drove to our post,
about twenty miles from the site. It had been arranged that the nearly 100 of us
present would be located in a circle about 100 miles in circumference
surrounding the bomb site. We were all to be in communication with each other
over telephones, all of which were connected through the exchange in Alamogordo.

     We arrived at the site at 4:15 a.m. and almost immediately it began to 
rain, quite a heavy, very typical torrential downpour during the summer. We 
waited in our car, and at 4:30 a.m. the time came and went, but the bomb did not
go off. Enrico and I assumed it might have been postponed due to the rainstorm, 
but decided to check with the other staff members to see for sure. For some 
reason, the telephone there at the site did not seem to work; the operator would
not respond. (Note: At that time, nearly all phones in the United States, and
certainly in New Mexico, were manual. No dialing of any sort was possible you
had to use the operator for everything.)

     Finally Enrico decided that we would drive into town and try to contact the
others and see what went wrong. So we drove back to town, and got there about
5:15 a.m. The only place open at that time of night was a hotel, and we stopped
in there to use a pay phone. Strangely enough, the pay phone was not working
either, or at least the operator never came on the line to ask what we wanted.
Enrico was quite curious about all this and decided to investigate. We went
outside the hotel, and Enrico found where the telephone wires came off the pole
and down into the building. He decided that we would follow the wires, so we
walked down the street looking overhead at the wires on the pole as we went
along. Finally, we turned down one street and saw a house. The telephone poles
and wires from all directions seemed to come down to this house. There must
have been hundreds of wires from telephone poles all coming down onto the side
of this house and going in through an opening.

     We noticed that there was a front porch light, which was on. The front door
was open, but there was a screen door, which was closed. We went up on the front
porch and looked into the house. A switchboard was there, and there were a
dozen or more lights on the switchboard lit, blinking off and on as people were
flashing the switch hooks on their phones trying to raise the operator. The
room was just dimly lit, and near the switchboard was a sofa, and a woman was
laying on the sofa sound asleep! Enrico pounded very loudly on the screen door,
and shouted at the woman. Suddenly she opened her eyes and looked at him, very
startled. Then she looked at the switchboard. Immediately she sprang up, dashed
over to the board, sat down and began frantically answering the calls.

     Without saying any more, Enrico and I left, went back to the hotel where 
our car was parked, and drove back to our monitoring post twenty miles out into
the desert. We had been at our post only about five minutes when the explosion 
went off, at about 6:30 a.m., which was two hours behind schedule. Later, we 
talked to the other staff members and found that there had been some confusion 
because of the rain. None of them had been able to reach the others because the
telephone operator had fallen asleep, and the phones were not getting
answered/connected...

     We on the staff all had a big laugh out of it, but nothing more was ever 
said or done, and I doubt to this day that that woman is even aware that the 
first atomic explosion in the world was delayed two hours because of her.

    Amazing, but true. Alamogordo was a tiny town back in the '40s, and it's 
very doubtful that the night operator had ever seen so much traffic in her life
as the hundred or so people all on the line at once that early morning. More 
than likely, the poor dear had had a very rough day the day before, in the 
miserable summer heat, had been unable to sleep during the day, and had come to
work that night thoroughly exhausted. She probably decided that "it won't hurt 
just to close my eyes for a minute...,"  and the rest of the story is already 
told. After all, experience had taught her that in fact she would not usually
get a dozen calls all night on her shift, and she felt relatively safe in 
stretching out just for a minute.