Tibbets noticed the metallic taste and the flash at the same time. “I got the brilliance,” he said later. “I tasted it. Yeah, I could taste it. It tasted like lead. And this was because of the fillings in my teeth. So that’s radiation, see. So I got this lead taste in my mouth and that was a big relief—I knew she had blown.”5 His copilot, Robert Lewis, turned back in his seat to look. He shouted wildly, striking Tibbets on the shoulder: “Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!” Lewis later wrote in his log of the mission, “My god, what have we done?”
