The Terrible Thing We Made Poem by Paul Hartal

On July 16,1945, the first atomic bomb
was detonated in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Richard Feynman, was a young physicist then
and a participant in the top secret
Manhattan Project that developed the bomb
at Los Alamos.

He observed the effects of the explosion
from a distance of twenty miles:

A tremendously bright flash lit up
in the sky, which changed from yellow
to orange. This was followed. he says,
after about a minute and a half,
by an enermous Bang and a long
thunderous rumble.

The birth of the Bomb was celebrated
euphorically by the participants
of the Manhattan Project.

Yet not everyone was happy.
The physicist Robert Wilson, for example,
moped about it. "It's a terrible thing
we made", he lamented.

Shortly after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, Feynman sat in a New York restaurant
and thought about the radius of damage,
the destruction of the Japanese cities,
and how far from there was 34th street?

And then he watched people
building a new road, or a bridge,
and he thought: "They don't understand.
Why are they making new things?
It's so useless."