Dawn of the Atomic Age: The Trinity Site
What happened here on July 16, 1945, was
literally earth-shaking.
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| Satellites dot the barren landscape at White Sands Missile Range. |
There aren't many places where you can stand on a spot where the world changed, fundamentally, in an instant. But you can do it at this isolated location in the New Mexico desert, where the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project detonated the world's first atomic bomb.
The men who developed and built the bomb at laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico, called it the "gadget." It was a plutonium bomb, its explosive force created when precisely timed detonations of TNT fused plutonium in the device's core, creating an atomic chain reaction and releasing enormous amounts of energy. Under the direction of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Los Alamos team finished their gadget by July 1945. Project leaders decided to conduct the first test at a site on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range some 200 miles to the south. At 5:29 in the morning of July 16 they detonated the bomb, which was so powerful it broke windows 120 miles away. "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," said Oppenheimer, quoting from a Hindu text. Atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped bring World War II to an end, but, in the decades since, the world has been haunted by the specter of nuclear war.
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| 'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,' said Oppenheimer. | |
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Today Trinity Site is open to the public only twice a year, on the first Saturday in April and October. Visitors can see what few traces remain of the 100-foot-tall steel tower at ground zero that held the bomb. The explosion, with a force equal to about 19,000 tons of TNT, vaporized the tower and fused the desert sand beneath it into green glass named Trinitite. The Atomic Energy Commission removed most of the Trinitite in 1952, but visitors shouldn't pick up any left behind because it's still radioactive. Radiation levels at the site itself are not hazardous, although the background levels are 10 times normal. Two miles away is the McDonald House, a one-story adobe home where technicians assembled the bomb in the master bedroom.
Trinity Site is in south-central New Mexico on the White Sands Missile Range. You can contact the range's public affairs office at (505) 678-1134. On the two days the site is open each year, military vehicles escort cars from Alamogordo's Otero County Fairgrounds, leaving at 8:00 a.m. (The round-trip is about 160 miles.) Visitors can also enter the White Sands Missile Range at the Stallion Gate. From I-25 head east on U.S. 380. After about 12 miles you'll see signs for the Missile Range. The gate is open 8:00-2:00. On the web, you can access the White Sands Missile Range's informative site at www.wsmr.army.mil/paopage/Pages/Trinst.htm. Contact the New Mexico Department of Tourism at (800) 733-6396 or find their website at www.newmexico.org/index.html.
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