On July 16, 1945 at roughly 5:29 A.M., Mountain War Time, in a remote location in the northern part of the White Sands Missle Range near the small village of San Antonio New Mexico the first nuclear blast was ignited.
The blast created a depression at the center of which, approximately where the gantry stood, is a small obelisk with a plaque reading “Trinity Site, Where the World’s First Nuclear Device Was Exploded on July 16, 1945.”
Attaching the bomb to the 100 foot gantry.
Oddly enough the area in which “Gadget” – the name of the Trinity bomb – was exploded is known as Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death.)
The mathematics of the blast said the effect could not be predicted. Some thought the reaction would be self-limiting. Some thought it would consume the earth in an uncontrolled chain reaction. They didn’t know. Some thought it wouldn’t work. They didn’t know.
It worked.
Legend has it that J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the scientific team, quoted this verse from the Bhagavad-Gita when he observed the fireball:
If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One…
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds.
In Alamagordo, 60 miles away, birds started falling from the sky, dead. For several days no birds would be seen or heard in Alamagordo. In the Capitan Mountains of New Mexico, 82 miles away, a woman preparing breakfast in a logging camp noted a light rising to the west and, again, the eerie silence. No birds were singing. No insects were humming. Silence. In Portales 220 miles away people awoke to a sun rising in the West.
It happened 60 years ago, today. Along the Jornada del Muerto.
