TRINITY: 50 YEARS LATER -- The Nuclear Age's Blinding Dawn (a special report published July 1995)
"We were reaching into the unknown, and we did not know what might come of it ..."
-- Brig. Gen. Thomas F. Farrell
By James Abarr
Of the Journal
In early evening, the weather began to deteriorate. Bands of low dark clouds, punctuated by flashes of lightning and propelled by gusty winds, scurried across the sky above the desert landscape.
By 11 p.m., a steady rain was falling.
From a base camp and reinforced bunkers dispersed throughout what had been dubbed "Trinity Site," more than 200 scientists and technicians -- among them some of the most brilliant men in the world in their fields -- watched and cursed the storm.
A critical test of nearly three years of work solving complex problems in nuclear physics, mathematics and other disciplines to create a new super weapon, was only hours away. Now, their efforts were threatened by the elements, for good weather was deemed essential to the test.
Watching and waiting with the scientists were observation teams which had gathered throughout the night. They waited in slit trenches and bunkers. They waited in the arroyos and on the surrounding hills to witness what would be the most spectacular dawn the world had ever seen.
From Carrizozo on the east across 65 miles of desert to San Antonio on the west, science teams and military personnel readied an array of recording instruments.
At San Antonio, south of Socorro, soldiers manning an observation point at Jose Miera's restaurant told him that if he stepped outside, "You'll see something the world has never seen before."
Wartime pressures
Since early 1943, when they had concentrated at the new, super-secret Los Alamos Laboratory high in the mountains northwest of Santa Fe, the scientists had labored under the pressures of World War II to fashion a weapon that utilized the principle of nuclear fission. It would be a weapon of unprecedented destructive force.
Because an aircraft was deemed the surest way to deliver it against an enemy, the new weapon emerged as a bomb -- an atomic bomb -- and it was destined to bring a sudden and abrupt end to the bloodiest war in history.
Among the scientists, labeled by one observer as "the most brilliant collection of crackpots ever assembled," was the cream of the nation's scientific minds, representing a dozen major universites.
They included theoretical physicists and mathematicians such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, Victor Weisskoff, John Von Neuman, Hans Bethe, Kenneth Bainbridge and Norris Bradbury, a future director of Los Alamos.
There were other specialists: George Kistiakowsky in chemistry and explosives; Cyril Smith and Eric Jette in metalurgy; and Capt. William Parsons, a U.S. Navy ordnance expert.
Their talents and perseverance, combined with the work of many colleagues, had created what they dubbed "The Gadget," and now, in the early-morning hours of July 16, 1945, it rested in a metal shed atop a 100-foot-high tower in the New Mexico desert.
Visiting Trinity Site
Trinity Site, on the northern section of White Sands Missile Range 120 miles south of Albuquerque, will be open to the public Saturday, April 1.
Visitors can tour Ground Zero and examine the casing of a plutonium bomb of the type tested in 1945.
Two miles from Ground Zero, visitors can inspect the George McDonald ranch house, where the plutonium core of the world's first atomic bomb was assembled.
TOURS:Visitors can reach Trinity Site in one of two ways:
* Through the Stallion Range Center gate, which will be open to the public on April 1 from 8 a.m.-2 p.m. This entrance is 12 miles east of San Antonio on U.S. 380 to a marked turnoff, then 5 miles south. Visitors will be allowed to drive the 17 miles from the gate to Trinity unescorted. Road is paved and marked.
* By caravan sponsored by Alamogordo Chamber of Commerce, which forms at Otero County Fairgrounds in Alamogordo and leaves at 8 a.m. Caravan will enter White Sands Missile Range west of Tularosa and be escorted to and from Trinity Site by military police. Caravan leaves Trinity at 12:30 p.m. for return to Alamogordo.
FACILITIES:
* Hot dogs and soft drinks will be offered in parking lot at test site. Portable toilet facilities will be available.
* Cameras are allowed at Trinity, but their use elsewhere on the missile range is strictly prohibited.
* Visitors are encouraged to fill gasoline tanks of their vehicles before entering White Sands Missile Range. No fuel is available on the range.
MORE INFORMATION: Call White Sands Missile Range Public Affairs Office: (505) 678-1134. |
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They knew their brainchild would be powerful beyond anything previously known, but a test was needed to determine just how powerful, or for that matter, if "The Gadget" would even work.
Oppenheimer, who had overseen the building of the bomb, and Bainbridge, test director of "Project Trinity," had ordered a delay in the scheduled 4 a.m. shot. At that hour, however, the rain ceased and the weather began to clear. At 5:10, it was decided the test was still a "go."
At 5:29:45 a.m. (Mountain War Time), "The Gadget" was detonated. In a millionth of a second, a massive fireball rose over Trinity and the world stepped across the threshold of the Nuclear Age.
Open twice a year
Today, Trinity Site lies in the northern section of the high-security White Sands Missile Range in the desert of southeastern Socorro County, 120 miles south of Albuquerque.
Twice each year, on the first Saturday of April and October, the military opens Trinity to the public. The first 2000 open house of the area, which has been a National Historic Landmark since 1975, is scheduled for April 1.
Visitors can tour Ground Zero, where a triangular-shaped stone monument marks where the tower that held the bomb stood. Nearby is a tentlike structure which protects a portion of the original crater, and during tours, the casing of a plutonium bomb of the type tested in 1945 is on display.
Two miles from Ground Zero, visitors can inspect the George McDonald ranch house, used by technicians to assemble the plutonium core of the bomb. The adobe house, built in 1913 by Franz Schmidt, a German immigrant who raised sheep and cattle, survived the blast with only minor damage.
After abandonment, the house suffered serious deterioration, but in 1984, the National Park Service restored it to appear as it did on that July day in 1945.
Each day Trinity Site is open, about 3,000 visitors from throughout the world, many from Japan, make the journey into this stark country, where the wind seems to continually sweep across the sage and desert grasses from the nearby mountains.
It's a lonely and remote land which stirs a sense of total isolation, but it was for these qualities that it was selected to usher in an age that has changed the world forever.
An incredible light
When Joe McKibben threw the firing switch that would automatically detonate the Trinity bomb in 60 seconds, scientists in the control bunker, 10,000 yards from Ground Zero, crossed their fingers, said silent prayers and waited for the explosion.
First came the light, an incredible burst that pushed back the night and bathed the desert and nearby mountains in errie brilliance. It was an unearthly glow that illuminated every peak, ridge and canyon as though the sun had abruptly risen.
In a millisecond, a churning, multicolored fireball boiled up from the desert floor, a raging cauldron with temperatures at its center estimated at four times those of the sun. The fireball rose swiftly in a vivid display of color, changing from yellow-green to orange to pink and then a deep purple.
With it rose a skirt of radioactive dust formed by thousands of tons of dirt and sand sucked upward by the tremendous blast.
As the scientists, wearing special dark goggles, watched from their bunkers, some wondered if the entire sky had somehow caught fire and if the giant fireball would ever stop growing.
As it soared swiftly to 15,000 feet above Trinity, the fireball began to pale, and the pillar of debris swept aloft flattened into the shape of a giant mushroom cloud. In a few more seconds, the cloud had climbed to 40,000 feet, where it formed into a ring of gray ash. It drifted off to the northeast, and behind it, the ionized air left a purple glow in the sky.
At ground level, the heat of the blast scorched the earth black over a radius of a quarter-mile from Ground Zero, and a jolting shock wave, accompanied by a thunderous roar, rumbled across the desert to reverberate again and again from the mountain peaks. As it passed, the force of the shock wave knocked a number of observers, more than five miles away, off their feet.
Although the men who had built the bomb had some idea of what to expect, they were not prepared for the awesome fury they had unleashed. All were stunned by the spectacle, and some were fearful. However, there also was pride in the historic scientific achievement of harnessing the atom, the basic building block of the universe.
As the scientists at Trinity emerged from their initial shock, their mood turned to glee. They grasped each other in hearty handshakes of congratulation and clapped each other on the back. Some even danced a jig.
One epitomized the spirit of the moment when he turned to a colleague and joyfully proclaimed: "It worked, the damn thing worked!"
A soldier who was part of the Army security team seemed to remember why the monster weapon had been developed when he announced to a companion:
"Buddy, you've just seen the end of the war."
'Words are inadequate'
When the spectacle of Trinity had faded, the scientists and others struggled to express what they had seen. It wasn't easy.
As Brig. Gen. Thomas Farrell, deputy commander of the Manhatten Engineer District, code name for the multi-faceted organization set up to build the bomb, put it:
"Words are inadequate tools for acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized."
Nevertheless, the scientists tried, and as Farrell later wrote:
"The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power has ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggar description. The whole countryside was lighted by a searing light with an intensity many times that of the midday sun...
"Seconds after the explosion came the air blast pressing hard against the people, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty."
Another soldier, apparently more fearful than awed, exclaimed: "The longhairs have let it get away from them."
Norris Bradbury, who oversaw the assembly of the bomb at the test site and who later would spend 25 years as director of Los Alamos Laboratory, called the shot "truly awe-inspiring. Most experiences in life can be comprehended by prior experiences, but the atom bomb did not fit into any preconception possessed by anybody."
William L. Laurence of The New York Times, the only newsman allowed to witness the test, wrote:
"It was like a grand finale of a mighty symphony of the elements, fascinating and terrifying, uplifting and crushing, ominous, devastating, full of promise and great foreboding. On that moment hung eternity ..."
A major problem
With the nuclear genie out of the bottle, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves faced a problem of immense proportions. As chief of the Manhattan District, he had to temporarily maintain the tight veil of wartime secrecy around the bomb.
Scarcely had the sound and fury of the blast faded when Groves reminded his aides: "We must keep this thing quiet."
Replied one: "But sir, I think they heard the noise in five states."
Said another: "Can you give us an easy job, general, like hiding the Mississippi River?"
It was only a slight exaggeration, for the Trinity blast was seen and heard across two-thirds of New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle and portions of eastern Arizona. Houses were shaken and windows blown out in Gallup, 235 miles from Ground Zero. Similar damage was reported in Deming and Silver City.
A forest ranger near Silver City placed a hurried telephone call to find out where the "earthquake" was centered.
In San Antonio, a resident wondered about the noise "like an airplane, a freight train and thunder all rolled into one."
Passengers aboard a train near Mountainair thought they had seen a big bomber blow apart in the sky. At the moment the intense light of the new weapon burst forth, a blind woman riding in a car south of Socorro reportedly turned to the driver and asked: "What was that?"
Some were certain that somehow the cosmic order of things had gone askew because the sun had suddenly risen and then just as swiftly set.
Throughout the day, newspaper offices within 300 miles of Trinity Site were flooded with phone calls inquiring about the strange glow in the predawn sky.
Officials at Alamogordo Army Air Base, now Holloman Air Force Base, released the explanation that "a considerable amount of high explosives in a remote area" of the base had detonated.
Three weeks later, on Aug. 6, 1945, the true events of Trinity were disclosed when an atomic bomb -- dubbed "Little Boy" -- was released from the B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay" and detonated at 1,500 feet over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Four square miles of the industrial and military complex were destroyed in the blink of an eye, and an estimated 70,000 Japanese perished.
On Aug. 7, a banner headline in the Albuquerque Journal proclaimed: "U.S. Announces Atomic Bomb."
Two days later, on Aug. 9, the Journal told New Mexicans: "Nagasaki Blasted by Second Atomic Bomb; Jap Shipping Center Second City To Meet Disaster From New American Super Weapon."
On Aug. 15, Japan surrendered, and World War II was over. America's $2 billion gamble on the atom had paid off.
Into Ground Zero
Within hours after the towering mushroom cloud, heavy with radioactivity, had billowed up over Trinity, the scientists moved in for a closer look.
Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had played a key role in unlocking the secrets of the atom, led a team in a special lead-lined tank to Ground Zero to recover soil samples.
At the point where the bomb had vented its fury, they found a blackened wasteland devoid of even the smallest insect life. The power unleashed by the bomb, estimated as the equivalent of 19,000 tons of TNT, left a 1,200-foot-wide, saucer-shaped depression in the earth 25 feet deep at the center. The earth had been pulverized and slammed downward as though from the blow of a giant hammer. The 100-foot-high steel tower which had cradled the bomb was gone -- vaporized by the intense fireball. Twisted stumps of the tower's four legs, driven seven feet into the desert sand, were all that remained to mark where it had stood.
Within a mile of Ground Zero, no creature, no blade of grass, no plant had survived. The team found carbonized shadows of small animals in the earth where the fierce heat had immolated them.
Fermi reported the discovery of "an area 400 yards wide in radius glazed with a green, glasslike substance where the sand had melted and solidified again."
This material, a product born of Trinity, was aptly named "Trinitite."
Today, Ground Zero at Trinity offers strong testimony to the recuperative powers of nature. Radiation levels are virtually nil, and the once-blackened and scorched land has fully recovered from the nuclear devastation of a half-century ago. Plants, grass, soil and wildlife have all returned, and part of the area is crowned by a virtual forest of New Mexico's state plant, the yucca.
Doubt and foreboding
In the aftermath of their spectacular achievement, many of the men who had brought forth "The Gadget" soon felt their jovial mood of triumph slipping away. In its place came feelings of doubt and foreboding.
In his book, "The Day of Trinity," Lansing Lamont described the change:
"The mood at Base Camp turned reflective. ... As the first euphoria faded, the impact of the shot began to settle on conscience. A strange oppessiveness hung in the air like humidity."
Project director Robert Oppenheimer was shaken and dazed by the fury of the bomb. He wondered if perhaps doomsday had been brought nearer, and he told a colleague he was reminded of a passage from an ancient Hindu text: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
George Kistiakowsky, the explosives expert who had designed the bomb's trigger, expressed his foreboding:
"I am sure that at the end of the world, in the last millisecond of the earth's existence, humanity will see what we have just seen."
Test director Kenneth Bainbridge was somewhat more succinct when he turned to Oppenheimer moments after the blast and lamented:
"Oppie, now we are all sons-of-bitches."
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