1945   NECESSITIES IN 1945, A special committee of the Manhattan Project headed by Nobel Prizewinning physicist James Franck was asked to examine the political consequences of atomic bombs. In their final report they reduced to one sentence the essence of combat for those armed with atomic weapons. Wrote Franck: "In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor." The committee, which had no military training whatsoever, thus summed up what would come to be known as the Cold War. *   *   * IN 1907, AN engineer with the J. M. Guffey Petroleum Company slipped into a canoe and paddled across a swamp to Caddo Lake, Louisiana. He halted, pulled in his paddles, leaned over the gunwales, and, near the surface of the water, lit a match.

The match promptly went poof! into a blossom of fire, proving that gas, and certainly oil, lay beneath this otherwise forlorn backwater of Louisiana. Gulf Oil Company promptly bought the rights to drill through the lake, and within years a cobweb of wooden trestles and walkways had spread across the surface of the lake, connecting an eerie landscape of wooden derricks. One after the other, the rigs found oil and gas, and soon Caddo Lake was forested with derricks standing in twelve feet of water, all of it sheltered, all of it calm. Oil exploration would now take to the seas. *   *   * WELL BEFORE THE Battle of Britain, the British Air Ministry wanted to evaluate the offensive capabilities of a new thing known as electromagnetic radiation. Could an electromagnetic wave of sufficient power melt the skin of a German bomber or, absent that, could it in some way incapacitate or kill the enemy pilot? they asked. They turned to Sir Robert Watson-Watt, superintendent of the Radio Research Station in Slough, England. Watson-Watt passed the question along and reported that there was no possibility of developing a radio "Death Ray," as one historian wrote, but there was an excellent possibility of tracking the reflected energy of such a ray and using it to detect enemy bombers.

Asked to prove it, Watson-Watt set up a demonstration so simple that a school-age child could have understood it. He tuned a receiver to the frequency of a common signal used by the BBC and set up an oscilloscope to display what he called "the bounce." He had a Royal Air Force Handley Page Heyford bomber fly a predetermined route some miles away and pointed his antenna to the sky. He turned on the scope and watched with amusement as the eyes of his observers snapped open wide as the line on the scope flared.   Radar.   Watson-Watt's first radio-wave-bouncing device would in time become Britain's Chain Home radar stations. In 1940, the Germans launched the air invasion of Great Britain but the warnings from the Chain Home radar stations gave the RAF time to launch their fighters. The British never blocked the German raids-that was beyond the capability of radar and certainly more than their small cadre of RAF pilots might hope to accomplish-but they exacted enough in German losses to win the Battle of Britain.

*   *   * THE BATTLE FOR the Marshall Islands began on January 31, 1944, and ended February 21. More than 40,000 American soldiers and marines took part in the invasion at a cost of more than 3,000 injured and 372 fatalities. The soldiers secured the islands and promptly moved forward, while behind them the construction battalions of the Seabees arrived. By March 1944, Kwajalein had been transformed into an island of barracks, Quonset huts, sheds, fuel farms, airfield, runways, maintenance sheds, docks, dust, and ammo dumps that, taken together, would become the primary advance resupply base supporting what would be known as the Pacific campaign. Twenty-two thousand men were based on Kwajalein, twelve thousand on Enewetak. Their sheltered lagoons would be dotted by ships that numbered in the hundreds. Said Don Whitman, who went to Enewetak to man a weather station: "I had these images of the South Pacific but when I arrived here, it was just another base. All of the trees had been blasted away in the war and what was left of them, bulldozed.

It was barren except for buildings and people and telephone poles."   Barren and more. About these islands an air force historian would write: "It was doubtful that searchers would find a more remote region on this planet outside the polar regions." In the years to come, even remote would be relative. *   *   * IN 1941, GERMANY invaded the Soviet Union, thus putting at war Adolf Hitler's Third Reich against Joseph Stalin's Communist Russia. Senator Harry Truman made no effort to hide his contempt for both nations when he spoke of this sudden turn of events. "If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia," said Truman, "and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and in that way let them kill as many as possible."   President Franklin D.

Roosevelt said more or less the same thing even as he forged an alliance with the Russians. "My children," said Roosevelt, paraphrasing an old Balkan proverb, "it is permitted you in time of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge." The bridge Americans wanted to cross was the one that led from the beaches of Normandy to Berlin. The devil they would walk with was Stalin. *   *   * FORECASTING THE HEIGHT of waves created by storms took on a sense of urgency in 1938 when the Pure Oil Company joined with the Superior Oil Company to explore a leased tract of land one mile offshore near Cameron, Louisiana. The plan was to build a freestanding platform in the Gulf of Mexico and drill in fourteen feet of water. The question was this: how high should the platform be elevated to allow free passage of waves between its legs?   I. W.

Alcorn, an engineer with Pure Oil, had ample experience building derricks on land but had no experience at sea. However, he had the cunning of a poker player. Alcorn consulted wave experts who assured him that in the Gulf of Mexico waves could grow no higher than fifteen feet. Alcorn didn't believe them for a moment. Instead, he had his own ideas. The name of Alcorn's platform would be taken from the tract leased from the state of Louisiana called the Creole tract and would be called the Creole platform. I. W.

Alcorn's Creole platform would go into the history books as the first real freestanding structure built in the open seas but more infamously as the first freestanding structure to be hit by a hurricane and washed away. But for Alcorn's cunning, the offshore-oil industry might well have retreated to land, but in fact Alcorn expected his platform to be struck by waves; what he endeavored to do was to preserve the piles, the legs under the platform. Alcorn knew that the driving of piles was by far the most difficult and certainly the most costly part of an offshore rig, so instead of hoping that waves would never top fifteen feet, he simply designed a platform that would break away in a storm if the waves hit it. Alcorn placed his platform on a swarm of three hundred legs, only a handful of which moved when a hurricane finally swept the Creole platform into the sea. The waves, of course, topped fifteen feet. Still, the experts ran thriving businesses. *   *   * IN THE FALL of 1943, Major General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, met with General Henry H.

"Hap" Arnold, commanding general of the army air forces, to ask for help. Groves needed to test the ballistics of a bomb casing that would in time hold an atomic bomb. Practice bombs' shapes needed to be modified based on the flight characteristics they exhibited. Groves asked Arnold to streamline the testing, but he also needed a guarantee of absolute secrecy. Arnold obliged on both parts, an act of cooperation that cut through countless weeks of senseless red tape. That Arnold did so had as much to do with the demands of the war effort as with Arnold's personal witness to the rapid changes in aeronautics. Arnold, the man who would usher in the era of the intercontinental nuclear bomber, had been trained to fly an airplane by the Wright brothers themselves. *   *   * HARRY DAGHLIAN FUMBLED.

After an evening lecture at the Los Alamos labs, Daghlian decided to continue a criticality experiment he'd started during the day. Daghlian had been "tickling the dragon's tail," as the scientists called it, building a critical assembly with a ball of plutonium and thirteen-pound tamper bricks made of tungsten carbide. At some point the assembly would go "critical" and a chain reaction would start, essentially a small atomic bomb; the trick was to contain it, to contain the fire of the dragon, so to speak.   The sweet smell of piñons no doubt drifted on the cool New Mexico air as Daghlian readied the final brick, but he fumbled and the tamper brick dropped into the pile, and with that, a bright, bluish light swelled between his hands. Daghlian hurriedly tore the pile apart but the spears of gamma had already pierced the flesh of his body and bathed his right hand in intense, deadly radiation.