The day the sun rose twice
Much of atomic bomb’s history took place in New Mexico
They say the sun rose twice over a corner of southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The first sunrise was produced by the detonation of a new weapon its makers had nicknamed “the gadget.” The actual sun rose 10 minutes later.
The world’s first atomic bomb exploded that morning, launching the nuclear age, and foreshadowing the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki within the month.
Though the creation of the bomb was dubbed the Manhattan Project, much of its development took place in New Mexico, making it the nation’s premier nuclear state, with, today, weapons labs, a cache of nuclear weapons, a nuclear command center and atomic history around every butte. Some of the sites are off limits to the public, but it is possible to tour atomic New Mexico without getting irradiated or arrested.
The detonation site itself is known as Trinity Site, and it lies within the White Sands Missile Range, a 3,200-square-mile area of forbidden high desert, on a plateau of creosote and sand.
The pandemic put a temporary halt to any visits. But late last year, the U.S. Army announced that it would resume public visits. Against the geopolitical backdrop of the war in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear rhetoric, there’s no time like the present to think about our nuclear history, and I decided to make Trinity Site my first stop on an atomic tour of the state. The bomb project’s lead scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, named it Trinity after a John Donne poem about humanity, faith and submission to God.
In New Mexico, relics of primordial geological violence are everywhere: plunging rifts and canyons, volcanic calderas, ancient lava flow and a vast, surreal, white desert, almost lunar.
Under a cobalt October sky, picnic tables, dogs on leashes, gamboling children. Volunteers grilled hot dogs and brats, and sold chips, candy, soda and water under a tent. Mushroom cloud T-shirts and other atomic swag could be had at another. Everyone ambled toward the precise spot where the gadget, a plutonium core surrounded by TNT, was detonated on a platform.
All that’s left of the 100-foot tower that evaporated that morning is a 2-inch stub of concrete, but a 12-foot obelisk with a plaque commemorates the date and detonation site. There the crowd coagulated, awaiting selfie turns.
Between photos and noshing on brats and chips, visitors rock-hunted, peering down at the sand for bits of the sage-green substance called trinitite. Trinitite was formed when sand, sucked up and liquefied by the blast, fell back to Earth. It is against federal law to take it home, but bits
are for sale at a nearby rock shop, for $30 to $60 a gram.
Before detonation, the gadget’s makers were not sure it would work. In the predawn dark, scientists and soldiers took up stations 10,000 yards from what they called ground zero, held slabs of welders’ glass before their eyes, and waited for the countdown.
One Army engineer, Roger Rasmussen, speaking to the Voices of the Manhattan Project, remembered the light coming through his closed eyelids. “We stood up and looked into this black abyss ahead of us. There was this beautiful color of the bomb, gorgeous. The colors were roving in and out of our visual range of course. The neutrons and gamma rays and all that went by with the first flash while we were down. There we stood, gawking at this.”
Radioactive fallout plumed over the area but the public was never warned, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication founded in 1945 by nuclear physicists concerned about the dangers of atomic weapons. The army publicly blamed windows blown out for 120 miles around on a munitions depot accident. Health data was never collected and descendants of some of the nearby rural inhabitants are still seeking compensation for what they say are generations of cancer.
Many scientists present at the first test came to rue their invention. The explosion was a “foul and awesome display,” the test director, Kenneth Bainbridge, said to Oppenheimer after the test. Truman’s Secretary of Commerce, Henry Wallace, wrote: “The guilt consciousness of atomic scientists is one of the most
astounding things I have ever seen.”
The White Sands Missile Range occupies 2.2 million acres and is buffered by miles of private ranchland. It is still used to test weapons, but ones of a conventional nature. (There has never been another aboveground nuclear test at the range.) The Army pays nearby inhabitants to evacuate for up to 12 hours if they plan a big test.
Activities on the test range are as top-secret as they were in 1945. Like Area 51 in Nevada, the missile range has attracted conspiracy theories. Besides UFO sightings, one of the oldest rumors is that thousands of tons of gold are buried in the off-limits mountains. The Army has allowed five digs
to disprove “the Legend of Victorio Peak.” No gold found so far.
New Mexico’s atomic tour continues farther north. At Santa Fe, the state capital, tourists visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, browse art galleries selling Indigenous and modern American art, and shop for silver and turquoise jewelry, but are often oblivious to the city’s history as a setting in a critical game of nuclear espionage with the Russians. Former CIA officer Bruce Held has written “A Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque,” identifying the sites around town (including a bridge and the landmark Spitz Clock) where American spies for the KGB dead-dropped papers and notes in invisible
ink, or handed them off at clandestine meetings.
Half an hour north of Santa Fe lies Los Alamos, the true birthplace of the nuclear age. Los Alamos today is home to one of the highest per capita percentages of millionaires in America and a great concentration of scientists working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos was just a dusty little Western town when the Manhattan Project bought a private boys’ school and gave it over to scientists and engineers working on the bomb.
It’s possible to drive through the Los Alamos National Laboratory grounds with a wave of a driver’s license at the gate. The 34 square miles of
rolling yellow hills speckled with giant satellite dishes house scientists working on projects from climate-change mitigation to advanced weaponry, including nukes. The labs are not public (people can drive through but cannot exit their vehicles, walk around unescorted or take photos), but the grounds are worth traversing for the reward at the far end: the Valles Caldera Natural Reserve, a 13-mile-wide circular depression created by the collapse of a massive volcano. The explosion 1.25 million years ago is now a vast protected meadow, open to hikers, where wildflowers, animals and streams testify to earth’s resilience in the aftermath of natural, if not man-made, disaster.