Labor of a Birth

DAY OF TRINITY by Lansing Lamont. 333 pages. Atheneum. $6.95.

Twenty years ago, over an arid stretch of New Mexican sand that the Spaniards called Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death), history's first atomic bomb blasted the dawn. This is the sometimes chilling story of that still chilling event. The author, a correspondent in TIME'S Washington bureau, has done a painstakingly thorough job of reporting that makes that lurid moment seem to have happened only yesterday.

Lamont tells his story in terms of the men and the science that conceived and built mankind's most destructive weapon. The route that led up to the bomb tower in the desert was one of monumental uncertainties and incalculable risks. Says Lamont: "Never in history had so many embarked on so fateful an undertaking with so little certainty about how to proceed."

Trinity was the name chosen by Physicist Robert Oppenheimer, scientific leader of the project, for the site of the assembly and testing of the bomb that would bring Japan to her knees. "Oppie," as he was known to his colleagues, was relaxing over a volume of John Donne's poems when word reached him that the Air Force had granted a site for the test in the Jornada, 55 miles northwest of Alamogordo. Asked to suggest a code name for the site, Oppie glanced at the line he had just read:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God. "Trinity," Oppenheimer said, "we'll call it Trinity."

Fresh material and personal glimpses of the men involved bring the familiar narrative to life: Einstein absently losing his way to the lavatory in Los Alamos, Fermi cycling his way to work, the sweat-pearled faces of the scientists as they eased the nuclear core into the bomb case and then took their places to watch the results of their own handi work: a sudden fire hotter and brighter than the sun.

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