Convoy at dawn to Trinity Site, October 6, 2012
Our small convoy passed fields thick with yucca, rising tall against the dawn sky. Before reaching the missile range, from the car window I snapped blurred photos of dense desert growth, evidence of the paradoxical effect of vast tracts of militarised land untouched for decades, regenerating to a pre-peopled state. We arrived at Trinity Site at 7:00 a.m. While the crew set up their tents and information booths, I walked the gravel path to ground zero, spending a solitary hour crisscrossing the fenced perimeter in the flat morning light. As the day passed, crowds swelled then tapered, long lines of visitors streamed through the gates, an unlikely pilgrimage to the place where the first atomic bomb was tested in a remote area of the New Mexican desert at 5:30 am, Mountain War Time, July 16, 1945. Conducted after the end of the European conflict during World War II by the top-secret Manhattan Project, the test was codenamed Trinity by lead theoretical physicist, Dr J Robert Oppenheimer. Under U S President Roosevelt, the project team raced to be the first to design and build an atomic device. 1 The Manhattan Project established three large facilities: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where gas diffusion and electromagnetic process plants were built to separate uranium 235 from its more common form, uranium 238; Hanford, Washington, where nuclear reactors produced a new element called plutonium; and Los Alamos, New Mexico, established to design and build the bomb. At Los Alamos many of the greatest scientific minds of the day laboured over the theory and construction of the device. The scientists settled on two designs for an atomic bomb, one using uranium 235 and another using plutonium. Because of its more complex design, project leaders decided a test of the plutonium bomb was essential before it could be used as a weapon of war. 2 atomic tourist
trinity site
display | apocrypha by mary kavanagh
The Atomic Age was born when the nuclear device, code- named ‘The Gadget’, was successfully exploded, the resultant mushroom cloud rising 38,000 feet and the flash being described as a light brighter than a dozen suns. The 19-kiloton-yield explosion took place on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, about 230 miles south of Los Alamos. Every living thing within a mile of the blast was obliterated. Surrounding ground zero was a crater almost 2,400 feet across and about 10 feet deep. 3 Desert sand was fused into a green coloured glass called Trinitite. This glass, which still litters the site, remains radioactive, with radiation levels in the fenced, ground zero area ten times greater than the region’s natural background radiation. Today this 3,200 square mile range is named the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) and is actively used for non-nuclear weapons testing. 1 Several nations in active development of an atomic bomb tried to determine the progress of the Nazis under physicist Werner Heisenberg. 2 Both uranium 235 and plutonium are fissionable and can be used to produce an atomic explosion. The uranium bomb was a simple design and scientists were confident it would work without testing. The plutonium bomb was more complex and worked by compressing the plutonium into a critical mass which sustains a chain reaction. The compression of the plutonium ball was to be accomplished by surrounding it with lense-shaped charges of conventional explosives. They were designed to all explode at the same instant. The force is directed inward, thus smashing the plutonium from all sides. 3 Many scientists and support personnel, including General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, watched the explosion from base camp ten miles southwest of ground zero. All the buildings at base camp were removed after the test. Most visiting VIPs watched from Compania Hill, 20 miles northwest of ground zero. Although no information on the test was released until after the atomic bomb was used as a weapon in Japan, people in New Mexico knew something had happened. The shock broke windows 120 miles away and was felt by many at least 160 miles away.
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