The U.S. scientists who tested the first atomic bomb, July 16, 1945, took the ultimate gamble of setting the atmosphere on fire and destroying all life on Earth.

When Robert Oppenheimer, the civilian head of the program, informed his boss, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Compton, about the test’s apocalyptic risk, Compton was appalled. According to Toby Ord in The Precipice (2020), Compton decided, “Unless they came up with a firm and reliable conclusion that our atomic bombs could not explode the air or the sea, those bombs must never be made.” In his memoir Atomic Quest (1956) Compton recalled thinking, “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!”

Gen. Leslie Groves, the military boss of the mission, also officially forbade the test unless the global risk was declared to be zero. Enrico Fermi, known as the “architect of the atomic bomb,” worked furiously on the computations and found atmospheric ignition “unlikely,” but, according to The Precipice, ominously “worried whether there were undiscovered phenomena that, under the novel conditions of extreme heat [50-million degrees Celsius], might lead to........

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