Thousands of people gathered Saturday at Trinity Site, a
restricted area of the White Sands Missile Range, to mark the 60th
anniversary of the world's first test of an atomic
weapon.??
Scientists working at Trinity Site as part of the Manhattan
Project created the nuclear device used in the test on July 16,
1945. That successful detonation led to the construction of the two
atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Japan
in August 1945, essentially stunning Japan into surrender and
ending World War II.
The depression created by the blast at ground zero on what is
now the White Sands Missile Range is marked by an obelisk with a
simple inscription: "Trinity Site, Where the World's First Nuclear
Device Was Exploded on July 16, 1945."
A long stretch of dirt road leads to a chain-link fence
surrounding the monument. On the fence hang photographs of
Manhattan Project scientists from Los Alamos assembling the device
and of the brilliant mushroom cloud.
Visitors stooped to pick up pieces of trininite, a radioactive,
turquoise crystal-like material that was created by the blast.
About a dozen people walked over the site with Geiger counters that
beeped sporadically.
Missile Range officials tell visitors not to fear radiation. On
average, an American is exposed to 360 millirem of radiation from
natural and medical sources every year. In an hour at the Trinity
site, visitors are exposed to one half millirem, according to a
brochure distributed by the missile range.
Emmett Hatch, who visited Trinity Site on Saturday, recalled how
his grandmother ordered him to drop to his knees and pray on July
16, 1945, shortly after the atomic blast.
She was awake at 5:29:45 Mountain War Time that morning in
Portales to make breakfast and saw the explosion from more than 220
miles away.
"She thought it was the coming of the Lord, because the sun rose
in the west that day," said Hatch, who was eight years old at the
time.
Andy Aranda, an Albuquerque high school student, said he learned
about the Trinity test from textbooks.
"It's kind of creepy, kind of eerie to be right here where it
happened," he said.
Clemente Deister of Socorro was in the Marines fighting in the
South Pacific during World War II when the bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He watched the faces of visitors to the Trinity Site on
Saturday. "I find all kinds of expressions of sadness and horror,"
he said.
The blast produced a flash of light that was seen 250 miles
away, a roar heard 50 miles away and a mushroom cloud that rose
40,000 feet.
"The most amazing part of it to all of us is that it seemed to
last so long," Jay Wechsler of Espanola, who measured the explosion
that day, recalled in an interview before the Trinity Site tour.
"The cloud just looked like it was boiling and luminescent and kept
on going up and up and up and seemed like it was never going to
stop."
"I had no conception that it could wipe out a small city," said
Herb Lehr of Mesa, Ariz., who helped put the bomb together at
Trinity Site.
Ben Benjamin, a photographer who documented the Manhattan
Project, recalled that after seeing the blast he said: "My God,
it's beautiful."
But Benjamin, who did not go on Saturday's tour, said another
man who worked on the project told him the blast was horrible and
that he could think of nothing more than the moral
implications.
"I thought about it, of course," said Benjamin, who now lives in
Albuquerque. "But I also thought, 'Didn't these guys bring it on
themselves?' Look what they did at Pearl Harbor."
Longtime Los Alamos lab critic Greg Mello said on the eve of the
60th anniversary that the US still has not come to grips with the
nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"These acts we still consider to be somehow, if not noble, then
somewhat justified. They were manifestly illegal at the time and
terribly immoral. By any standard, they were crimes," he said.
Many of those involved in the Manhattan Project said they had no
regrets.
"It was important work. People were pretty driven to get things
done in the length of time we did," said Wechsler, who did not
attend the tour. "Motivation is hardly the world. Driven is more
like it. The goals were set, and people moved ahead and got on with
the work. We all felt it was pretty important."
(Chinadaily.com.cn via agencies, July 18, 2005)