Still tall, still thin, still smoking two packs a day (with the exception of today; I fear I may unconsciously promote myself to the mythical realm of six-pack chain smokers). The days leading up to this forsaken date in history have been particularly unkind to my appetite. I have never experienced such depression and such desire to retreat into reclusion since the time in Paris when I had leapt up and attempted to throttle my dear friend Francis Ferguson by the neck. God, that incident still embarrasses me even now. To think that it had all begun with me merely narrating the frustrations I had at the time with experimental physics!

I used to think I needed physics more than I needed friends. But what good is physics if it removes from existence all of mankind, let alone any friends I might have?

Katherine has also been losing weight. This whole mess has clearly affected her too. She hates to see me like this, and I hate to see her like this. The days of our courtship in Berkeley seem so distant now, I am not even sure if it is a memory or only a dream. God knows I need those memories. Memories are the platform for our reason, and should we lose them, we lose our sanity. I need all the sanity I can get in these dark times.

I cannot quite remember what exactly it was that I felt when we drove out to the vast desolate plains of Alamogordo in the early hours of the morning. Ah, yes. I remember now. I am ashamed to have felt great confidence and pride, amour propre bursting out of my chest as I looked ahead at the site of our first major test. The ranch shack housing the gadget, the fruit of our labor, awaited us. The rain was pouring down in buckets and lightning struck like warning signals from the gods. We held our breath each time the electricity split the sky, for an accidental detonation would be disaster.

I had named the test site Trinity. In retrospect, it was blasphemous of me to suggest a place of destruction to be named as such. Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death. From it a quotation:

"As West and East
In all flat Maps—and I am one—are on,
So death doth touch the Resurrection."

That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, Donne opens,

"Batter my heart, three person'd God;—."

Beyond this, I have no clue whatever as to why I named it so.

The skies finally cleared at about 5 a.m. We were shepherded to a base camp ten miles away. Feynman, that eternal joker, refused to wear the dark glasses that would protect his eyes from the flash, testament to both his testicular fortitude and general lack of good sense.

The passing of twenty minutes seemed like an eternity, a lifetime. I laugh now to think whose lifetime it was. Perhaps it was mine; that would explain my wasting away. The flash reached us first, illuminating our surroundings brighter than any sun can, swathing us with colors of purple, to green, and eventually to white before the roar of the shock wave hit us like a million-gun salute forty seconds later. The presence of the 12km-tall mushroom cloud was so immense, so loud, so bright, so hot – and it was so very hot, like being in an oven in that bunker ten miles away- that I felt like I was standing at the feet and mercy of a malevolent and omnipresent god.

If the radiance of a thousand suns

were to burst into the sky,

that would be like

the splendor of the Mighty One—

I am become Death, the shatterer of Worlds.

I am become death. I led this team, a team composed of the most brilliant physicists around that I had handpicked myself, into creating the most devastating weapon ever invented in the history of mankind, and in two weeks the world will witness the full extent of its powers. We will watch and shake and tremble at what we will do to this earth and at how we will change it.

At how I will change it.

The name on my badge says "J. R. Oppenheimer", but it will not mean a thing to those Japs. I am keeping this journal as proof that I once was famous, I once graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard in just three years, I once was the bright founder of modern theoretical physics; and I am keeping this journal as proof that as of today, July 16th 1945, I wish I never were any of the above.

They will know me as the man who made the A-bomb.