of a roaring fireplace. Every living thing within a mile of the tower
was obliterated. The power of the bomb was estimated to be equal to
20,000 tons of TNT, or equivalent to the bomb load of 2,000 B-29,
Superfortresses!

After witnessing the awesome blast, Oppenheimer quoted a line from a
sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita: He said: "I am become death,
the shatterer of worlds."[6] In Los Alamos 230 miles to the north, a
group of scientists' wives who had stayed up all night for the not so
secret test, saw the light and heard the distant sound. One wife,
Jane Wilson, described it this way, "Then it came. The blinding light
[no] one had ever seen. The trees, illuminated, leaping out. The
mountains flashing into life. Later, the long slow rumble. Something
had happened, all right, for good or ill."[7]

General Groves' deputy commander, Brigadier General T. F. Farrell,
described the explosion in great detail: "The effects could well be
called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and
terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever
occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The
whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many
times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray,
and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby
mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but
must be seen to be imagined..."[8]

Immediately after the test a Sherman M-4 tank, equipped with its own
air supply, and lined with two inches of lead went out to explore the
site. The lead lining added 12 tons to the tank's weight, but was
necessary to protect its occupants from the radiation levels at ground