Trinity Site, Five Twenty-Nine AM, July Sixteenth, Nineteen Forty-Five

At five twenty-nine and forty-five seconds on the morning of July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five, the Chihuahuan Desert south of Albuquerque became briefly brighter than the sun.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was watching from a bunker six miles away. He did not speak. Years later, in a nineteen sixty-five television interview on NBC, he described what he said he thought in that moment: a line from the ancient Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter Eleven, Verse Thirty-Two. "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." That is what he later said he thought. Whether any version of those words crossed his mind on the morning itself is not established in the record. The interview, broadcast two decades after the fact, is what survives.

The device that detonated at Trinity was a plutonium implosion bomb, the same design as the weapon dropped on Nagasaki twenty-four days later. The Hiroshima bomb, a uranium gun-type design, was never tested beforehand. The scientists were confident enough in it to use it without a test. Trinity was the proof of concept for the more complex design.

The explosion produced a crater about five feet deep and nearly three hundred feet across. The desert sand beneath it fused into a pale green glass that scientists called trinitite. Observers seven miles away felt heat on their skin. The mushroom cloud rose thirty-eight thousand feet.

New Mexico provided both the testing ground and much of the intellectual labor. The Los Alamos laboratory on the Pajarito Plateau, sixty miles north, had employed ten thousand people for eighteen months to build what detonated here. The uranium that fed the wartime bomb program came mostly from the Belgian Congo. It was only after the war that large uranium mines opened on and near the Navajo Nation, two hundred miles to the northwest, to feed the Cold War arsenal.

Twenty-two days after Trinity, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on August sixth, nineteen forty-five. Three days after that, Nagasaki. Japan announced its surrender six days later, with the formal signing following weeks after that. The Trinity test preceded all of it.

The site at White Sands Missile Range is open to the public twice yearly: the first Saturday of April and the first Saturday of October. The trinitite that survived the initial cleanup was later declared federal property. The crater is still visible. The desert around it is still monitored for residual contamination.