Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

1945年“三位一体”核试验失传影像修复重现

At 0.016 seconds after the atomic detonation, the fireball was already hundreds of meters wide. The tiny squares to the left and right in this image are billboards 200 meters from the center of the explosion. 在原子弹爆炸后0.016秒，火球的宽度就已经达到了数百米。图中左右两侧的小方块是距离爆炸中心200米处的广告牌。

Editor’s note: If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945, is an excellent choice. That was the moment when human beings first unleashed the power of the nucleus in an immense, blinding ball of fire above a gloomy stretch of desert in the Jornada del Muerto basin in New Mexico. 编者按：如果你想确定世界进入核时代的瞬间，1945年7月16日凌晨5点29分45秒（山区战时时间）是一个绝佳的选择。那一刻，人类首次在新墨西哥州“死亡之旅”（Jornada del Muerto）盆地一片阴郁的沙漠上空，释放了原子核的力量，形成了一个巨大而耀眼的火球。

Emily Seyl’s Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test (The University of Chicago Press) offers hundreds of startlingly vivid photographs of the Manhattan Project that emerged from a 20-year restoration effort. This excerpt and the accompanying photos record the massive effort to capture the awesome detonation of “the Gadget.” 艾米莉·塞勒（Emily Seyl）所著的《三位一体：世界首次原子弹试验图史》（芝加哥大学出版社出版）展示了数百张曼哈顿计划中令人惊叹的生动照片，这些照片源于一项长达20年的修复工程。本文摘录及随附照片记录了捕捉“小玩意”（The Gadget，原子弹代号）震撼爆炸过程的巨大努力。

In the North 10,000 photography bunker, Berlyn Brixner was listening to the countdown on a loudspeaker, his head inside a turret loaded with cameras and film. He was one of the only people instructed to look toward the blast—through his welder’s glasses—ready to follow the path of the fireball as it launched into the sky. The two Mitchell movie cameras at his station would deliver the best footage to come of the Trinity test, used by Los Alamos scientists to make some of the first measurements of the effects of a nuclear explosion. 在北10,000号摄影掩体中，伯林·布里克斯纳（Berlyn Brixner）正通过扬声器听着倒计时，他的头探进一个装满摄像机和胶片的炮塔里。他是为数不多被指示戴上焊工护目镜直视爆炸的人之一，随时准备追踪火球冲向天空的轨迹。他所在的观测站配备的两台米切尔（Mitchell）电影摄影机，拍摄到了“三位一体”试验中最珍贵的影像，洛斯阿拉莫斯实验室的科学家们利用这些影像完成了对核爆炸效应的首次测量。

When the detonators fired, the cameras captured what Brixner could not have seen—the very first light of a violent, silent sea of energy unfurling into the basin. As 32 blocks of high explosives erupted all together, their incredible force surged inward toward the sleeping plutonium core, compressing the dense sphere of metal instantaneously from all sides and bringing its atoms impossibly close together. A carefully timed burst of neutrons sowed momentary, uncontrolled chaos, and then, as quickly as it began, the fission chain reaction ended. 当引爆器启动时，摄像机捕捉到了布里克斯纳肉眼无法看到的景象——那是一片狂暴而寂静的能量之海在盆地中铺展开来的最初光芒。当32块高能炸药同时引爆时，它们惊人的力量向内涌向沉睡的钚核，瞬间从四面八方压缩这颗致密的金属球，使其原子紧密地挤压在一起。精心定时释放的中子流引发了短暂且不可控的混乱，随后，裂变链式反应在开始后迅速结束。

Footage from a high-speed Fastax camera in Brixner’s bunker, shot through a thick glass porthole, shows a translucent orb bursting through the darkness less than a hundredth of a second after detonation, as a rush of heat, light, and matter blew apart the Gadget. 布里克斯纳掩体中一台高速Fastax摄像机透过厚厚的玻璃舷窗拍摄的画面显示，在爆炸发生不到百分之一秒后，一个半透明的球体冲破黑暗，随之而来的热量、光线和物质流将“小玩意”彻底摧毁。

When the brightness faded enough for witnesses to make out ground zero, they saw a wall of dust rise up around a brilliant, shape-shifting, multicolored ball of flames—forming a fiery cloud that shot into the sky atop a twisting stream of debris. The camera footage tells a story no less dramatic but hundreds of times more intricate, preserving the moment for scientists to return to again and again to measure and describe the behavior of the fireball and other visible effects with exacting detail. 当亮度减弱到足以让目击者看清爆炸中心时，他们看到一堵尘墙在耀眼、变幻莫测、五彩斑斓的火球周围升起，形成了一朵冲向天空的火云，顶着一股扭曲的碎片流。摄像机记录下的故事同样戏剧性，且细节丰富了数百倍，它将这一瞬间保存下来，供科学家们反复研究，以精确的细节测量和描述火球的行为及其他可见效应。

On balance, the photography effort was a huge success, despite only 11 of the 52 cameras producing satisfactory images. By arranging those cameras at intentionally staggered distances, complementary angles, and with a broad spectrum of frame rates and focal lengths, the Spectrographic and Photographic Measurements Group was able to piece together a remarkably complete picture of their subject. 总的来说，尽管52台摄像机中只有11台拍摄到了令人满意的图像，但摄影工作取得了巨大成功。通过将这些摄像机以刻意错开的距离、互补的角度以及广泛的帧率和焦距进行布置，光谱与摄影测量小组得以拼凑出一幅关于研究对象极其完整的画面。

According to the group’s leader, Julian Mack, the more than 100,000 frames that were captured still “give no idea of the brightness, or of time and space scales.” Mack attributed fortune, as much as foresight, to the photographic record that was made, especially during the earliest phase of the blast. Indeed, the explosion was several times more powerful than predicted, and the intensity of its effects overwhelmed many of the cameras and diagnostic instruments. 据该小组负责人朱利安·麦克（Julian Mack）称，所拍摄的超过10万帧画面仍然“无法体现出爆炸的亮度，也无法反映时间和空间的尺度”。麦克认为，能够留下这些影像记录，既归功于远见，也归功于运气，尤其是在爆炸的最早期阶段。事实上，这次爆炸的威力比预期的要大几倍，其效应的强度超出了许多摄像机和诊断仪器的承受能力。

The human observers were similarly overcome. “The shot was truly awe-inspiring,” said Norris Bradbury, the physicist who would succeed Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos. “Most experiences in life can be comprehended by prior experiences, but the atom bomb did not fit into any preconception possessed by anybody. The most startling feature was the intense light.” 人类观察者同样感到震撼。后来接替罗伯特·奥本海默担任洛斯阿拉莫斯实验室主任的物理学家诺里斯·布拉德伯里（Norris Bradbury）说：“这次爆炸确实令人敬畏。生活中大多数经历都可以通过以往的经验来理解，但原子弹不符合任何人的预想。最令人震惊的特征就是那强烈的光芒。”

It is a common sentiment that words and even pictures pale in comparison to the experience of the explosion. Even so, soldiers, scientists, and many other witnesses have added their firsthand accounts—often absorbing and poetic—to complement the trove of hard data collected during the test shot. They describe an intense and blinding brightness that filled the basin with daytime; an ominous, darkening cloud rearing its head in eerie silence; the wait for the invisible wave rushing out from… 人们普遍认为，与亲历爆炸的感受相比，文字甚至图片都显得苍白无力。即便如此，士兵、科学家和其他许多目击者还是留下了他们的第一手记录——这些记录往往引人入胜且富有诗意——补充了试验期间收集的大量硬数据。他们描述了那种强烈的、令人目盲的光芒将盆地照得如同白昼；描述了那朵在诡异寂静中升起的阴森、昏暗的云团；以及等待着那股从爆炸中心奔涌而出的无形冲击波的时刻……