At Trinity, the culminating site of the so-called Nuclear Trail, a thousand-mile trip up the I-25 from the Mexican border to Wyoming and along memorable sites of America’s nuclear past, visitors are moved by a sense of awe and mystery associated with the bomb’s destructive power as well as with those responsible for its creation. Trinity was declared a national historic landmark in 1975. The 51,500-acre area includes base camp, where the scientists and support group lived; ground zero, where the bomb was detonated; and the McDonald ranch house, where the plutonium core of the bomb was assembled. In addition, one of the old instrumentation bunkers is visible beside the road just west of ground zero. The U S Army has been responsible for Trinity’s status as a tourist destination. The site, deep in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, does not lend itself to heavy traffic. However, on two days each year, the first Saturday in April and October, the site is open to the public and visitors in the thousands travel to experience where the atomic age first began. Public interest in Trinity Site has remained intense since it was opened to the press for the first time on September 9, 1945, shortly following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Photographs of General Groves and Dr Oppenheimer talking with reporters as they point out the remains of the tower holding the device, were widely distributed in the press. In 1953, after the site clean up led by the Atomic Energy Commission, visitors attended the first public open house. Since that time, the steady increase of visitors along with the effort to interpret its past, testifies to the continued importance of Trinity in the larger story of the Manhattan Project. Despite the fact that Trinity might be described as visually anti-climactic, thousands of people visit the site each year. 4 Visitor surveys show that the majority of tourists are from New Mexico and neighbouring states, with fewer from distant states and other countries. 5
I visited Trinity for the first time on October 6, 2012, one of over 3000 visitors that day. One after another, they stepped up to be photographed next to the modest obelisk that now marks the blast site. Some brought tokens to leave behind or pictures to hold, some brought their children, others their dogs. Everyone brought cameras. They were patriots, peace activists, veterans and scientists. They were history buffs, seasoned travellers, curious citizens and honeymooners. One man asked me if I could feel it, the residual energy of the momentous event that had occurred here. He wondered if it was possible to know nothing of what had happened and to feel it anyway. This was the question we carried while scavenging for signs of the site’s original expression. Here so many bodies seemed heavy with the weight of history, this legacy of mass destruction and death contained in a narrative of national pride and scientific heroism. Since the end of the Cold War atomic tourism has been on the rise. 6 Many sites associated with former WWII nuclear programs have been opened to the public and attract an ever-increasing number of visitors. The idea of top secrecy seems to be a powerful tool of attraction. High on the list of popular atomic tourist destinations are the sites linked to the Manhattan Project. Atomic tourism is not a new phenomenon. It inadvertently started in the early 1950s when U S President Harry Truman designated a large piece of the Nevada desert to be used as a test site for nuclear weapons, tests deemed necessary in case such weapons were used against American citizens. If there were any concerns about the risks of the nuclear explosions, they were effectively erased by a major government publicity campaign that helped the people of Las Vegas to abandon their misgivings about the detonations, and eventually market the atomic explosions to promote their city. 7 While nostalgic notions of duck and cover and the fear of nuclear apocalypse belong to the Cold War era, the perception of historical distance creates the conditions for people to collectively reflect on that era, while the continually changing face of military policy, technology and war, ensure a cyclically renewed urgency around the subject of advanced weaponry.
Tourists browse the perimeter fence encircling ground zero at Trinity Site
6 Atomic or nuclear tourism, a growing global phenomenon, attracts millions of visitors each year to significant sites of atomic history, such as museums dedicated to interpreting and preserving atomic research and production, vehicles that carried atomic weapons, sites where atomic weapons were detonated, or sites of nuclear accidents. Public interest in these sites parallels the increasing interest in preservation and heritage tourism, as well as an emerging trend of disaster tourism, in which people visit sites of devastation (Katrina, 9/11 ground zero) keeping pace with occurrences of real life devastation, and extreme or adventure tourism, defined as thrill seeking or a search for authentic experience even at the cost of personal risk. For example, since 2011, Chernobyl tours have consistently sold out, and museums of atomic history have reported an increase in attendance by 12- 20%, with museum officials attributing the increase to a renewed interest in nuclear reactors and nuclear radiation as a result of Japan’s Fukushima
4 Museums and parks dedicated to telling the story of nuclear technologies, legacies of the arms race and the Cold War, are being created and visited at an astonishing rate. Recently, an increasing number of critics have been looking at atomic tourist sites for their ‘unreal’ representations of atomic history. Nuclear museums in the United States continue to struggle to control rhetoric that informs public understanding of nuclear weapons development. American cultural critic, Marita Sturken has argued that the representation of political history has become a place of much controversy, a place where historians, preservationists, museum directors, government representatives, human rights advocates and the public come together to navigate the often-contested terrain of national political narratives. (in Berger, footnote 5) 5 Jenna Berger. “Nuclear Tourism and the Manhattan Project,” Columbia Journal of American Studies , 2003.
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accident of March 2011. ( Chicago Sun-Times , April 27, 2011) 7 Las Vegas. An Unconventional History . PBS documentary, 2005.
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