Departures: NM99: Part J

Zero...

Something Interesting Happened Here Once

Photo by Joyce: Goofy tourists in front of tourist site

1999.04.03 SAT

The Trinity blast site was pretty much as I'd heard it described. It was chihuahuan desert with the plants cut low--presumably so that no-one would trip over them.

A stone marker had been raised to mark ground zero. No-one actually called it "ground zero," they all just said "zero".

Most of the area's been cleaned up. The radioactive trinitite picked up, the crater filled in with soil. Actually, there hadn't been much of a crater.

A wood and corrugated-metal shelter had been put up over one section of ground, and that section had not been cleaned up. Inside the shelter, you could see trinitite. It was drab and dusty, clusters of green clumped on brown dirt.

There were photographs attached to the fence, but I'd seen them before.

There was a casing of a fat-man bomb, the kind of bomb which had been tested.

It was all here. And I was already familiar with all of it.

Gerry told the story well. The building of the tower. The test blast of many tons of TNT, for comparison. Bringing the parts of the Trinity gadget down from Los Alamos in the trunk of the car. The officer who was asked to sign for the gadget had asked its value--and been told $2 billion. The officer said he wanted to see what he was signing for, and got to touch a slick metal sphere, warm to the touch.

The gadget was assembled, raised to the top of the tower. The test was set for 4am. Some Los Alamos wives and associates, who officially didn't know about the test, had arranged to have a sunrise picnic on some mountains overlooking the site.

A number of Army trucks parked at a nearby town. Officially, they were there by coincidence. Unofficially, they were to evacuate the town if a shift in the wind brought fallout nearby.

There was a delay, an electrical storm. The weatherman prayed. The storm passed.

They detonated the gadget. There was a flash, a cloud, a wave of heat, a sound that kept going. The clouds glowed. Many wept. The scientists had had a betting pool on the force of the bomb. The winner, I.I. Rabi, had bet on the outcome predicted by the scientists. None of the other scientists had.

That was the story. I already knew the story. Why had I come here?

Gerry was ready to take questions. He did. He told people where the scientists had been posted. He talked about spy scares.

Someone asked him about the name "Trinity."

Gerry said that no-one was sure about where the name had come from. Oppenheimer had been into Hindu myths, and had talked about their trinity--the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer.

Someone in the audience piped up: "We have a trinity too, you know. That's the father, the son, and the holy ghost."

Gerry looked at her, asked her, "And what religion are you, ma'am?"

"Why, I'm a Christian."

"Mm-hmm."

Someone asked how the site had been chosen.

It's said that Bob Henderson and the local sheriff were driving around the area looking for a good spot, driving around in jeeps with four men. Bob noticed some bedsheets stretched out flat on the ground, and asked the sherrif about them.

The sherrif said that the bomber pilots training nearby used the sheets as targets.

This made Mr. Henderson nervous. Were any planes going to drop bombs on them while they were out here?

The sherrif replied, Nope. He had warned the base that there would be people out on the range. No bombs today.

There was a rumble of airplanes. Bob Henderson was nervous, pointed them out to the sherrif. The sherrif pointed out that the planes weren't flying in a bombing formation. They were just in a normal flying formation. They weren't going to do any bombing.

Sure enough, the planes flew past, no problem.

Then the planes circled around, this time in a new formation. The sherrif's eyes grew wide. "The sheets!" he yelled, "Get on the sheets! They never hit them!"

Everyone scrambled to get on the sheets. Bombs fell around. But the search party emerged unscathed.

I'm not sure if Gerry's anecdote answered the question, but maybe it did something better than that.

Gerry is sometimes called the Mayor of the National Atomic Museum. He's credited with organizing the scientific tours. The Museum offers about a tour a month, visiting various atomic sites across the nation.

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