Alumni Sandstorm ~ 04/06/15 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1 Bomber sent stuff and 1 Bomber Memorial today: Pete BEAULIEU ('62) *************************************************************** *************************************************************** BOMBER BIRTHDAY Today: Barbara BERKELEY ('63) BOMBER BIRTHDAY Today: Randy DYKEMAN ('69) BOMBER BIRTHDAY Today: Steve KING ('73) BOMBER BIRTHDAY Today: Cindy RAEKES ('82) BOMBER CALENDAR: Richland Bombers Calendar Click the event you want to know more about. *************************************************************** *************************************************************** >>From: Pete BEAULIEU ('62) Re: Plutonium and Easter We read on these pages that the first delivery of plutonium to Los Alamos was on Easter, 1944. I didn't know that. But in the end the bomb had nothing to do with either Easter or actually beating Hitler. The first successful detonation at Alamagordo, NM was on July 16, 1945. Germany surrendered two months earlier in May 1945. An interesting conversation took place in the bunker on that historic moment on the New Mexico desert. Oppenheimer, the scientific brain behind the entire Manhattan Project, blurted a probably rehearsed and staged line from the Hindu Scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds." That he also had given the code name "Trinity" to the project is regarded by some as blasphemy. His colleague, Kenneth Bainbridge, the physicist in charge of the actual bomb test, also realized the nearly boundless power of atomic energy for evil as well as good. He turned back to Oppenheimer and said: "Well, Oppie, now we're all sons of bitches!" (Michael B. Stoff, Jonathan F. Fanton, R. Hal Williams, The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age [New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1991], 5. -Pete BEAULIEU ('62) ~ Shoreline, WA *************************************************************** *************************************************************** Bomber Memorial >>Rick POLK ~ Class of 1970 ~ 1951 - 2015 Bomber Memorials *************************************************************** *************************************************************** That's it for today. Please send more. ***************************************************************