It was nearly 8 p.m. and I still wasn’t glowing.
Twelve hours earlier I had been waiting outside of Stallion Gate, the northern entrance to the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, for my chance to enter and see firsthand the Trinity Site where the world’s first atomic bomb was tested. Twice a year, the first Saturdays in October and April, the Army opens up the site, now a national historic landmark, to the public. This was my opportunity to witness the exact spot where the atomic age dawned.
At 8 a.m. the gate opened and our line of waiting cars was waved inside the still top-secret missile range. It’s a 17-mile drive from the gate to a parking lot alongside the ground zero area where the bomb was exploded. Along the way you pass one of the three instrumentation bunkers that were built to monitor the blast.
I was the fourth car in the parking lot that morning. Even today, 47 years later, a fence surrounds ground zero. But on these two annual visiting days the entrance is open and you just walk in.
The Army picked a desolate place for its test explosion, a remote but huge 3,200-square-mile bombing and gunnery range in the desert shrubland about 120 miles south of Albuquerque. It was close enough to Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was developed, for the necessary scientists to be assembled, yet far enough away from unwanted civilian witnesses.
Early Spanish explorers had named the bleak area the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death). Little did they know the full portent of that description.
Site is little changed
The site hasn’t changed much in all these years. The desert still stretches westward to the Rio Grande and eastward to the Sierra Oscura Mountains. But now there is a black lava obelisk marking true ground zero, the site of a former 100-foot steel tower where the suspended bomb was exploded. The blast instantly vaporized the tower, and only one twisted metal footing encased in concrete survives to bear witness to the new force unleashed on the world that day. A photo of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project’s lead scientist, and Gen. Leslie Groves, the military commander, examining this same twisted wreckage only a few months after the test, is on exhibit.
The bomb obliterated every living thing within a mile of the tower and created a crater almost 2,400 feet across and about 10 feet deep. Sand in the crater was fused by the intense heat of the explosion into a radioactive, jade-colored, glasslike substance later called Trinitite. Most of the Trinitite was collected and the crater filled in, but an original portion remains under a low shelter just west of the obelisk. Peering through the windows gives you some idea of the post-blast terrain.
Also on display at ground zero is a replica of Fat Man, the bomb exploded over Nagasaki, Japan, that was a duplicate of the bomb tested here at Trinity. Historical photos of that eventful day and the Manhattan Project that led to the development of the atomic bomb are arranged on the fence that encloses the site.
Being one of the first visitors to arrive that morning, I initially had the area pretty much to myself. In the early morning chill of the timeless landscape, I imagined myself back on July 16, 1945, when the bomb was tested and a new era began.
The countdown began at 5:10 that morning, and the bomb exploded at 5:29:45 Mountain War Time. The blinding flash of light was seen throughout New Mexico and parts of Texas and Arizona. Shock waves broke windows 120 miles away.
Witnesses speak
One eyewitness called the explosion “unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. . . . The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun.” Oppenheimer quoted a line from the Hindu text, Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Army officials simply claimed a munitions storage depot had exploded.
My serenity didn’t last long. By 10 a.m. when the guided car caravan arrived from the missile range’s southern entrance at Alamogordo, ground zero was being overrun with sightseers.
Beating a hasty retreat to the parking lot I examined the remains of Jumbo, a huge 214-ton steel container with 15-inch thick walls, originally designed and constructed to house the bomb during the test. Since the scientists were not sure if the bomb would really work, Jumbo was built to contain the rare and radioactive plutonium core from being scattered over the landscape in case of failure.
But growing faith in the bomb design and the realization that a successful nuclear explosion would add 214 tons of highly radioactive debris into the air made Jumbo superfluous. Instead, it was suspended from another tower 800 yards from ground zero. Though the blast wrecked this tower, too, Jumbo survived intact. Attempts to destroy Jumbo after the war only succeeded in blowing off its two ends. Buried in the nearby desert, Jumbo was dug up and returned to Trinity in the 1970s.
By now tour buses from El Paso had appeared and discharged their passengers, too. Between 1,200 and 1,500 visitors come in October and another 3,000 in April, according to Monte Marlin, the Army’s public affairs officer. To serve them the parking lot was beginning to resemble a shopping mall, with a hot dog stand, a trailer selling souvenir T-shirts, baseball caps and mugs with Trinity logos, a bookstand and 14 portable toilets.
McDonald house
There was one site left to visit: the McDonald ranch house where the bomb’s plutonium core was assembled. Originally built in 1913 by Franz Schmidt, a German immigrant and homesteader, the house was sold in the 1920s to the George McDonald family. Once the land became a bombing range during World War II, the ranch was abandoned until Manhattan Project personnel arrived early in 1945 to complete the bomb.
Buses leave the parking lot approximately every 15 minutes for the 2-mile ride to the ranch. The house has been restored to its wartime appearance, with special attention to the core assembly room. Outside, I looked over the Chicago Aeromotor windmill and large water storage tank that was converted into a swimming pool by the scientists and support staff. Surprisingly, the Trinity explosion did little damage to the house, only knocking over its chimney and blowing out all the windows.
Back at the parking lot, I checked out the radiation exposure issue with Capt. Gary Matcek, the Army’s nuclear medical science officer on duty. Sitting beside a Geiger counter continually clacking because of the Trinitite sample alongside it, Matcek assured me that there was only “a little bit of radiation” at ground zero, and what there is was “below what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers background radiation.”
But there was a sign prohibiting eating, drinking, chewing gum, smoking, or putting on cosmetics within the fenced-in ground zero area, since ingesting any radioactive material raises the potential danger. And the Army’s official press release noted that radiation levels within the fenced area average 10 times higher than the region’s natural background radiation.
Even so, the release insisted that a one-hour visit to the site results in only a one-half to one milliroentgen exposure, less than what you would receive flying coast to coast. Still, the Army advises small children and pregnant women to use extra consideration before visiting the area.
A clean reading
Taking no chances, I had Matcek scan me with his Geiger counter before leaving. Not even the soles of my shoes registered a measurable dose.
Not wanting to leave the way I had entered, I waited until 1 p.m. for the Army-escorted car caravan to depart on the 85-mile drive to the missile range’s southern entrance near Alamogordo. Since every New Mexico road map I had ever seen showed no roads anywhere on the range’s 3,200 square miles, I expected a slow journey on a bumpy, dirt track.
Not so. Except for the city of Albuquerque, I saw more pavement on my drive out than anywhere else in this rural state. Our defense tax dollars at work. At every junction, security vehicles with flashing lights blocked access to ensure our swift egress from the base. And I thought the Cold War was over.
Several hours later I was sitting in an Alamogordo motel room waiting for the sun to set. Once it got dark, I conducted my own radiation test-could I read the room clock without turning on the lights, utilizing only my newfound background glow. So far, thankfully, I’m still traveling with a flashlight. –
