Nuclear bomb test site comes to life at museum
Event marks completion of Trinity Tower model
As workers hoisted the contraption known as the Gadget — the world’s first nuclear bomb to be detonated — to the top of the 100-foot-tall steel tower, a small cluster of mattresses was placed on the ground below it.
“Just in case it fell,” said Jim Walther, executive director of Albuquerque’s National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. “Isn’t that something?”
When the dust from the July 16, 1945, explosion had settled, the steel tower that had held the Gadget was gone, vaporized by the intense heat of the blast.
Even the sand around ground zero had melted, forming pieces of greenish glass known as trinitite.
As a result, there’s not much to see there these days, save some concrete and rebar from the tower’s footings.
In Albuquerque, at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, visitors can see artifacts and other historical items from the story of the world’s first nuclear explosion.
And on Friday, the museum will introduce its newest piece of history: a nearly full-scale model of the Trinity Tower.
At 98 feet tall and made of 15,000 pounds of steel, the tower is clearly visible outside the museum. Atop the steel tower is a tiny shed. The original shed was oak-floored and surrounded on three sides by corrugated iron and had a hatch in the bottom to receive the bomb. The
fourth, open side faced a camera bunker west of the tower.
The model of the tower is completely enclosed, with the “open” side and bottom hatch painted on.
It took around two months to erect.
Most of the structure is from a 1950s-era fire observation tower from a forest in Alabama, Walther said.
A replica of the Gadget was donated by the property master of the canceled TV show “The Manhattan Project.”
The replica will hang from a pulley as if it were being lifted to the top of the tower before detonation.
“We are so excited to be able to bring such an important piece of history to life at the museum,” museum spokeswoman Jennifer Hayden said.
Several local companies contributed time and equipment to make the project a reality, Hayden said.
Clay Kemper Perkins, a nuclear science enthusiast, retired physicist and philanthropist, pitched the idea to the museum and funded it.
Perkins was 11 years old when the plutonium-based Gadget detonated and its successor, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, three weeks later. (The bomb dropped on Hiroshima — the first used in warfare — was uranium-based.)
The events left a lasting impression on him.
“I was old enough to be fully conscious of the war and be aware of how it ended,” Perkins, now 83, said from his home in Ranchos Santa Fe, a San Diego suburb. “That is what made me go into physics.”
The museum will host a special outdoor event featuring a screening of the History Channel’s “Modern Marvels: The Manhattan Project” and a chance to see the replica.