New Mexico and THE BOMB
75TH ANNIVERSARY OF TRINITY Atomic weapon made big impact on state that gave it birth
At 7:30 on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, Navy Capt. William Sterling “Deak” Parsons squeezed his way into the dark bomb bay of a B-29 Superfortress named the Enola Gay.
The big American bomber was in flight at about 31,000 feet, 45 minutes from the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Parsons, 43 at the time and the weaponeer on the Enola Gay, grew up in Fort Sumner. An exceptional student, he spoke Spanish fluently, finished at Fort Sumner High in 1918 and was accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy, from which he graduated in 1922.
Parsons’ military specialty was ordnance (weapons). He was associate director at Los Alamos during the development of nuclear weapons there, and he had observed, from the vantage point of an airborne B-29, the detonation of the first atomic bomb at New Mexico’s Trinity Site on July 16, 1945.
Now, three weeks after the test explosion at Trinity, Parsons was aboard another B-29. He sidled his way up to a 10-foot-long atomic
bomb nicknamed Little Boy and armed it.
At 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, Little Boy dropped from the Enola Gay, exploded at 1,800 feet above Hiroshima and immediately killed 70,000 to 80,000 people, 30% of the city’s population, mostly civilians, and wiped out 4.7 square miles.
“Maybe another 60,000 to 70,000 people died within several months afterwards from radiation,” said history professor Jon Hunner, now retired from New Mexico State University. “With nuclear weapons, we now have the possibility of ending human history, the threat of mutual assured destruction.”
A second atomic bomb, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945. It killed more than 45,000 people on detonation. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945, ending World War II. Both Little Boy and Fat Man had been designed and built at Los Alamos, as had the Gadget, a plutonium bomb tested at Trinity Site, a portion of the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, 30 miles southeast of Socorro.
All this was part of the Manhattan Project, the United States’ effort to create an atomic bomb for use in World War II.
New Mexico was vital to the building of the bomb, but the bomb proved as essential to the building of New Mexico.
“It had a huge impact on the state,” said Luis Campos, professor of the history of science at the University of New Mexico. “The investment of federal monies in the labs was a huge factor in the development of New Mexico.”
Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque were spawned by the bomb, as was uranium mining in the state and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a radioactive waste repository near Carlsbad.
Other byproducts of the nuclear industry in the state include radioactive fallout from the July 1945 test at Trinity Site, an accidental uranium mill spill that released radioactive material into the Puerco River at Church Rock in July 1979, an airborne release of radioactive material at WIPP in 2014 and, as recently as last month, the potential exposure of 15 employees to plutonium-238 at LANL.
“There would be people who would disagree that the development of the bomb was a good thing for the state or the nation,” said Jim Walther, director of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque.
A bomb boost
“The Manhattan Project (affect) on New Mexico is manifold,” said history professor Hunner, author of books about Los Alamos and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who directed the science team at Los Alamos.
Hunner lives in France. The Journal interviewed him by email.
During World War II, Hunner said the Manhattan Project brought high-paying jobs into a part of the state that could use them.
“People from northern New Mexico, from the Española Valley and the pueblos, from the villages in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains came to Los Alamos and found employment,” he said. “Granted, few New Mexicans worked in the labs as scientists, but still the federal jobs were betterpaying ones than those often found in the state.”
He said some used that money after the war to send their children to university and others were able to keep alive their traditional farming lifestyles supplemented by the salaries at Los Alamos.
“The Manhattan Project helped propel New Mex ico into a high-tech role with research,” Hunner said. “Not just in