Words Fail Me

At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the first man-made nuclear detonation occurred when the Manhattan Project successfully tested a nuclear bomb in a remote location in the deserts of New Mexico.  Oppenheimer codenamed the test as Trinity.

Twice a year—the first Saturday in April and the first Saturday in October—the U.S. government opens the White Sands Missile Range opens to visitors. Thousands of people come each year to visit Trinity Site, ground zero of that first nuclear explosion.A memorial plinth of black lava rock stands at the exact hypocenter.Pictures decorate the fence enclosing the area for the “open house”.The Manhattan Project developed two different types of bombs simultaneously.  One had a complicated implosion-type mechanism and was nicknamed “Fat Man” after Sydney Greenstreet‘s rotund character in the movie adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. The other had a straightforward gun-type mechanism and, because of its long, thin design, was nicknamed “Thin Man” after the eponymous character in another Dashiell Hammett novel.  (In fact it was so straightforward that it wasn’t deemed necessary to test it!)  However, the original Thin Man design had an unacceptably high risk of predetonation and might “fizzle” so a  safer version nicknamed “Little Boy” evolved out it.

“Little Boy” would end up being dropped on Hiroshima.  The “Fat Man” design was tested at Trinity Site and “Fat Man” would be dropped on Nagasaki.I first learned about trinitite in Douglas Coupland‘s debut novel Generation X: Tales from an Accelerated Culture.I took a shot straight down at the ruddy, sandy soil.  This is what the heat of the Trinity test melted into trinitite.All (known) trinitite at Trinity Site has long-since been secured by the U.S. Government.  However, they did have a folding table with a box of samples.They also had several Geiger counters at the table for people to try out.  You could wave them over the samples and see that they are still slightly “hot”.

However, the overlapping clicks from multiple Geiger counters going off stressed me the fuck out.  A lifelong diet of science books & apocalyptic media had conditioned me to know  that that much clicking meant we needed to get out of the area immediately or we’d all die from radiation sickness.  It filled me with a nagging, primal dread.  I was stressed out the entire time I was walking around Trinity Site.  The. entire. time.I tried to regain my composure by looking out past the barbed wire at the beautiful desert landscape surrounding ground zero, stretching out to the distant mountains.There was an optional bus tour to visit McDonald Ranch Home where the bomb was assembled, but—just like with the Geiger counters—I’ve been conditioned to not allow soldiers to round me up and put me on an unmarked bus.The other thing I couldn’t stop thinking about during my visit was how the sun must look down and scoff at our dabbling with nuclear fission.