Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

At 5:30 a.m., the countdown reached zero and the voice on the loudspeaker said, “Now.” A pinprick of searing white light expanded almost instantly to become a small sun, half a mile in diameter, and the predawn darkness vanished in a cosmic flash, as blinding as a photographer’s flashbulb. For a moment, the desert was lit to the horizon by a noonlike brightness, until most of the light was suddenly sucked back into the vortex of the blast, or so it appeared to the witnesses. Ascending, the great orb seemed to liquefy and dissolve into boiling neon colors, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of gold, green, orange, blue, gray, and purple. Elongating vertically into the shape of a column, it rose through the cloud ceiling and climbed to 10,000 feet, 20,000 feet, 30,000 feet. A mushroom cloud formed at the top, at an altitude later estimated at 41,000 feet, while the base remained a surging, seething, churning mass of gas, smoke, and dust, as bright as burning magnesium but more colorful. For 40 miles in every direction, the New Mexico wilderness was bathed in a violet light that illuminated every hill, ridge, and gulch with searing clarity.