A Visit To Trinity
YOU TAKE THE U.S. 380 EXIT EAST OFF I-25 AT TINY SAN Antonio, New Mexico, heading for the Rio Grande. Conrad Hilton was born in San Antonio, and his father ran the first Hilton hotel in an adobe building near the train station. Now the hottest place in San Antonio is the Owl Bar & Café, regionally famous for selling “the world’s best green chili cheeseburger.”
If she’s on duty, Rowena Baca, the congenial co-owner of the Owl, will be happy to tell you the story of what happened to her in San Antonio just before dawn on July 16, 1945: “I woke up to my grandmother screaming. Everything was red. It was like the end of the world. She pushed me under the bed, and that’s all I remember.” She won’t say how old she was in 1945, only that she was small enough to fit easily under the bed. You are not far from Trinity Site, place of the event in southern New Mexico that inspired the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 41-year-old director of the Los Alamos atom bomb lab, to recall the ancient Hindu scripture “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Oppenheimer, who displayed a wide poetic streak, had written to a friend some years before, “My two great loves are physics and desert country; it’s a pity they can’t be combined.” They were at Trinity. In America, sightseers and serious travelers have many stimulating choices: beautiful man-made things like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, the U.S. Capitol, Chicago’s skyline at night; breathtaking natural sights like the Grand Canyon, Mount Shasta, Niagara Falls. Then there are ordinary-looking places where important events occurred: Gettysburg, Kitty Hawk, the hills above the Eittle Bighorn in Montana, the old bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. In the last category, Trinity Site, on its high alkaline plain between the Rio Grande and the Sierra Oscura, may be the most nondescript of all spots in America where something truly momentous occurred.
The event was the explosion of the world’s first atomic bomb, a test of the Manhattan Project’s complicated plutonium “gadget,” later called Fat Man, the model that devastated Nagasaki, and companion to Eittle Boy, the Hiroshima uranium bomb. The Trinity test created a light brighter than many suns and sent a fireball into the heavens, coloring the sky a devil’s palette of a brilliant blinding white, yellow, light orange, scarlet, green, and red. As the fireball rose, purple was seen, visible proof of the fiendish radiation caused by the nuclear explosion, which created electrical excitations in the surrounding air. The light at detonation was so intense that a blind girl more than 40 miles away said, “What was that?”
Richard P. Feynman, a young physicist in 1945, was at Compania Hill, 20 miles northwest of ground zero and near today’s Stallion Range Gate. He did not heed instructions to wear dark glasses or look away from the explosion and paid for his risk taking with a temporary loss of vision in one eye. He sat behind a truck windshield, one of the few who watched with their naked eyes. He later wrote: “This tremendous flash out there is so bright I duck.… I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange … then finally a big ball of orange.” After about 90 seconds he said he heard “a tremendous noise— BANG , and then a rumble, like thunder.”
At the control bunker, six miles south of the explosion, the man in charge of the test, the physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, turned to Oppenheimer as the mushroom cloud ascended and said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
You drive east down U.S. 380 from San Antonio across the Rio Grande, 12 miles to the turnoff to the White Sands Missile Range, and another 5 or so south to the Stallion Range Gate. Normally it is closed to the public, but on the first Saturday in April and October, the public is welcome between 8:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. To pass, you must acknowledge the usual military rules against weapons, alcohol, narcotics, and protest marches. You read and sign a paper that warns of possibly severe weather, rattlesnakes, and the necessity of staying on the marked route to avoid encounters with explosives left over from the more than 42,000 missiles and rockets fired at the range since 1945. They wave you on your way after handing out an informative illustrated booklet about Trinity Site.
Another 17 miles south on paved roads through harsh high country, under a huge and gorgeous sky with mountains in every direction, and you have arrived at a place Spanish explorers called Jornada del Muerto, “journey of death,” where there were Apaches, wind, limitless distance, and no water. Here is ground zero for the cold new age of nuclear weapons.
In 1944 Oppenheimer and his scientists knew that the plutonium implosion bomb was a tricky design, much more complicated than the gun-type scheme of the uranium device Little Boy. Plutonium was much more powerful than weaponsgrade uranium but required a much quicker method of reaching its explosive supercritical mass. The bomb makers came up with implosion, which meant high-explosive charges directing an explosion inward to the plutonium core to trigger the nuclear reaction, a delicate technique.
A test would be necessary and prudent to be sure it worked. The Manhattan Project borrowed an 18-by-24-mile portion of the Army Air Forces’ Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, a 200-mile drive south of Los Alamos. About 300 scientists, technicians, and security police settled in. Oppenheimer said he suggested Trinity as the project’s code name, possibly getting the idea from a religious devotional poem by the English poet John Donne. This poem begins with the words “Batter my heart, three person’d God.”
The Army has not done much with the site since 1945. Nature has replaced the after-test charred look with desert vegetation, and the area appears benign. It is remarkably lowkey, with almost funky aspects on visitors’ days. There is a piece of flat ground with mountains in the near distance, a parking lot with signs directing visitors to ground zero, and electric carts for the infirm. Before viewing the main attraction, you can ask questions at an information booth or buy Trinity T-shirts, postcards, refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs, or other trinkets from nonprofit vendors. Beyond their booths stand a generous number of portable toilets.
Jim Eckles, who has been the Army’s public affairs representative at Trinity for 24 years, says that in recent years up to three or four thousand people visit on each of the “open house” days. Most are from New Mexico, but usually he also sees license plates from 30 or more states. The Army, he says, would like to open the site more often but is limited by lack of money and the fact that White Sands is an active and restricted missile and explosives test range. “People come here because they are curious, and the curiosity is often generated by the news media, which take a periodic interest in the site,” Eckles says. “People, for the most part, are not well informed.”
During my two visits on public days, the visitors have included laypeople who often didn’t have a clue about atomic history. Others have been professionals who had either worked in the civilian nuclear industry or been nuclear Cold Warriors, such as Strategic Air Command bomber crewmen or ballisticmissile personnel. Some have been history buffs or Manhattan Project aficionados or nuclear-weapons nuts. A lot of visitors bring dogs (leash required). Everyone has a camera, but there is not much to photograph. Most people are too young to remember 1945, the bombs, and the end of the war. One group, speaking German, turned out to be part of the German air force’s training center at Holloman Air Force Base at Alamogordo. Asked why they were at Trinity, one said, “We came for the history.”
UNTIL 2000, VISITORS WERE TOLD NOT TO EAT OR drink while at ground zero because of a slight danger of ingesting radioactive dust particles. This warning has been withdrawn. Radiation is low, according to the booklet handed out at Stallion Range Gate. An hour at ground zero will result in a whole-body exposure of one-half to one milliroentgen (mrem). One chest x-ray produces 22 mrem. Even so, the booklet states, some people “feel any extra exposure should be avoided,” particularly among small children and pregnant women.
Ground zero is a quarter-mile walk from the parking lot. The close-up view is anticlimactic, more like an arid vacant lot than what you’d expect of a historic site. The only noticeable difference in topography from the surrounding area is a platelike depression, slightly dished, perhaps a quarter of a mile across. The vegetation is trimmed for ease of walking and to discourage shade-loving rattlers. Ground zero resembles a pebbly, scrubby yard badly in need of watering. Its unmaintained look, its lack of adornment, adds, in fact, to a sense of menace. So commonplace, yet history is whispering in the wind.
A tall black-lava marker at ground zero notes the date of the explosion of “the world’s first nuclear device” and designates the spot as a National Historic Landmark. The marker stands directly under where the five-ton bomb nestled in a small metal shed atop a four-legged 100-foot steel tower. The gadget was a dark steel egg, 5 feet in diameter and containing 5,300 pounds of high explosives around its plutonium core. At detonation, the tower vaporized in the many thousand degrees of heat. All that remain are shards of one concrete footing and stubby ends of reinforcing steel. This tower remnant has a fence around it the size of a card table. A tiny desert plant grows next to it. Nearby is another clump of crumbling concrete, perhaps part of another concrete footing. An elderly lady looks at the overall scene after reading the marker’s explanation and murmurs, “Mercy, mercy.”
A mother and her preteen son wonder what the tower was for, even though the card-table fence carries an explanation. They think the gadget was dropped from the tower. It was not. It was detonated on its high perch partly because scientists wanted to avoid creating a large crater that would send up a huge amount of radioactive soil. Both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs exploded above 1,500 feet.
If you look closely at the reddish dirt, you may see small pieces of dull greenish rock, all that remains of the layer of trinitite up to a half-inch thick that covered the area after the blast. Trinitite, still for sale at various places, including on the Internet, was created when the nuclear heat fused the sandy soil around the tower. Years ago, visitors carried off dinner-platesized pieces as a treasure, a unique one since it does not exist anywhere else. People now are forbidden to remove the slightly radioactive bits, just as arrowheads and cartridge cases are not to be taken from the scene of Custer’s Last Stand.
On visitors’ days the Army brings a replica of the Fat Man bomb casing to the site to show what the bomb used against Nagasaki looked like. Fat Man looked the same as the test bomb except that it was painted yellow and had a streamlined body and tail fins. Several dozen historical photos are mounted on the perimeter fence. They show the area in 1945 as test preparations were under way, the tower, the bomb assembly, the gadget, the explosion, and blast effects.
Off to one side is a shelter built over a small portion of the original trinitite crater floor, in its original condition. The crater was a shallow depression lined with the shiny, glasslike material. To reduce the radiation hazard, it was graded and filled, raising it two to three feet and all but eliminating any evidence it had existed. Much of the trinitite was buried.
According to the book Day of Trinity , by Lansing Lamont, the physicist Herbert Anderson rode to ground zero in a leadlined tank as soon as the smoke and dust cleared after the blast and told of seeing “a great jade blossom” surrounding where the tower had been. The green trinitite lay inside a 1,200foot-wide saucer some 25 feet deep at its center. Within a mile of the crater there was no sign of life or vegetation. Anderson collected dirt samples using a remote-control retriever. They were more radioactive than his Geieer counter could measure.
In 1947 scientists from the Atomic Energy Commission determined that the land at ground zero was depressed as if “a gigantic sledge hammer had hit it.” All vegetation within 2,000 feet of the center was still destroyed. Trinitite covered about 73 acres, and neutron radiation directly under ground zero went as deep as 42 inches. Plutonium was found in the soil as far as 85 miles from Trinity.
Eckles, the Army public affairs person, says animal life seems normal now, an opinion backed up by the large amount of rabbit droppings around the marker. In the once-sterile ground zero area, grasses, yucca, and weeds have returned. But creosote bush, which grows thick outside the ground zero fenced area, does not exist within.
On the path back to the parking lot, a radiation information booth, staffed by technicians with a Geiger counter, displays a few household objects alongside some trinitite. The technicians show how old radium-dial watches, for instance, mildly excite the Geiger counter. An orange Fiestaware dinner plate registers higher readings than the trinitite. The plate’s orange glaze was made from soil containing uranium. That glaze is no longer marketed.
A popular play spot for the visiting children is Jumbo, a gigantic 214-ton steel Thermos-like object the scientists built when they weren’t sure implosion would work. They feared that if the nuclear reaction fizzled, priceless and dangerous plutonium would be blown widely over the countryside. If the bomb were exploded inside a massive container, plutonium would be lost only if it worked as planned.
Jumbo’s role was abandoned as confidence in the gadget’s design grew. The steel jug was placed 800 yards from ground zero, where it survived the nuclear explosion. It now lies near the trinket stands in the parking lot. Both its ends were blown out years ago in a test with conventional explosives, so it looks like a thick giant pipe about 15 feet long and 12 feet across. Children play inside it, yelling as they run through.
Jumbo is one of the few surviving original objects at the test area other than the McDonald ranch site, two dusty miles by free shuttle bus south of the parking lot. The McDonald ranch looks like what it is, an abandoned ranch in the desert, with a one-story adobe house, a stone wall, a few outbuildings, corrals, part of a windmill, and a water tank that the test personnel used as a swimming hole. Scrubby vegetation covers the grounds. A large sign warns of snakes.
The ranch house is historic because the scientists turned its little master bedroom into a “clean room” for the sensitive job of assembling the gadget’s plutonium core on the morning of Friday, July 13, 1945. The core’s outer casing of natural uranium metal resembled a large sausage, about 4 inches in diameter and 12 inches long. Two nickel-plated half-spheres of metallic plutonium alloyed with gallium were fitted inside the sausage. They weighed 13.5 pounds and were the fruit of almost three years of intense work by participants in the Manhattan Project. Fitted together, they were about the size of an orange. One scientist called them “those portentous bits of warm metal.”
A nut-sized piece called the initiator, an arrangement of polonium and neutron-rich beryllium, lay in the center of the hemispheres. Later that day, at the tower, the sausage core was placed in the gadget’s belly, surrounded by high explosives. At detonation, the plutonium core and the initiator were squeezed by the high-explosive spherical implosion wave to about the size of a large marble. The initiator then ignited a supercritical chain reaction in the plutonium. In a flash, the Trinity fireball boiled into being.
The ranch house sustained modest damage when the gadget exploded two miles away. Windows blew out and the barn’s roof bowed down. The house has been restored to make it look as it did in 1945. Inside, the Army has mounted explanatory photos and information about bomb assembly, as well as some shots of the aftermath of the explosion.
EXCEPT FOR THE DRIVE BACK TO U.S. 380, THAT’S TRIN ity. A relaxed visit takes about two hours, not counting driving time. A word about the weather: In 1945 a night of thunderstorms delayed the shot, an example of the New Mexico weather that Oppenheimer called “whimsical.” During my April 2000 visit, there was snow, sleet, rain, sun, and wind. The October open house is usually warm and pleasant.
On the way to and from 380 you may see deer and pronghorn and possibly the impressive African antelope called oryx, or gemsbok, introduced to White Sands in 1969. The missile range is also home to coyotes, wild mustangs, and mountain lions.
Anyone looking for local color should put off the pleasure of another green chili cheeseburger at the Owl and drive east on 380 to Bingham, in 1945 a trading village 20 miles north of Trinity. The Bingham area registered heavy fallout, and even today people tell tall tales of glowing fence posts after the explosion. The town now has only two businesses. On the right going east is Blanchard’s Rock Shop—a low, rambling building, a trailer, and piles of rocks. Allison Nelson is the proprietor. She sells trinitite collected years ago. It goes for $20 to $30 for a quarter-sized piece, or more if especially nice and shiny.
“I sell a lot of it. You have to be careful where you buy it. You can fake trinitite using a welding torch,” Nelson says. She has heard of one piece as big as a dinner plate, perhaps another tall tale, with an asking price of $50,000.
Across the highway, an old but well-kept wooden building holds Bingham Books and General Store. Clayton R. Douglas, the personable storekeeper and owner, sells a few staples like chips and soft drinks but mostly he either publishes or sells politically ultraconservative books and magazines. Sample titles: America in Peril, The Sovereign American’s Handbook, Bulletproof Privacy, Good-Bye April 15th! The author of the last two of these is named Boston T. Party.
Douglas is happy where he is and has no complaints about the Army or White Sands missiles. Occasionally the Army pays him to evacuate his store if a missile test is headed his way. The old alarms about radioactivity also don’t bother him. “There’s an old fellow who still ranches not far from here,” he told me. “He tells a story about how early on the day after the Trinity test he saw some men in white coats carrying little clicking black boxes near his ranch house. He asked them what they were doing, and they said they were looking for radioactivity. He told them he didn’t even own a radio.”
Headed west back on 380, I decided to stop in at the Owl in San Antonio for another $2.75 green chili cheeseburger and a Coors and hope that good-natured Rowena Baca was still on duty. She was, and was pleased to embellish her earlier story of hiding under the bed when the sky turned red.
She said men who called themselves gold prospectors were staying at her family’s general store, hotel, bar, and café establishment during the summer of 1945. Everyone knew that they really were military security people connected to whatever was going on in the desert. One of the “prospectors” told her grandfather, J. E. Miera, that if he stood outside his bar before sunrise on Monday the sixteenth, he would see something no one had seen before.
The test, the red sky, and her grandmother Teresa screaming were only the beginning for her family, said Mrs. Baca. “My mother stayed furious for years. San Antonio was not evacuated. We got no warning, nothing. She was mad.”
As she turned to take an order, I asked her if she had ever visited Trinity. “Yeah, I’ve been out there. There’s really not much to see.”
