Trinity — The First Nuclear Explosion, Sixty Miles North

On the morning of July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five, a device was detonated on a steel tower in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead, a stretch of desert about sixty miles north of Alamogordo that the Spanish had named for the people who died crossing it without water. The device was a plutonium implosion bomb, the first of its kind ever tested, built under the Manhattan Project, the secret American program to develop nuclear weapons. The explosion released energy equivalent to about twenty-one kilotons of TNT.

It vaporized the steel tower, fused the desert sand into a glassy green mineral later called trinitite, and sent a fireball visible more than two hundred miles away, as far as Amarillo, Texas, rising into the pre-dawn sky. The scientist in charge of the project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, later said the detonation brought to his mind a line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Residents of Alamogordo who had not been warned reported a blinding flash of light before sunrise and a shock wave that shook their windows. The test site, code-named Trinity, is now part of White Sands Missile Range and is open to the public twice a year, on the first Saturdays of April and October. A modest obelisk marks the spot where the tower stood.

A section of the trinitite-covered ground is preserved under a shelter. Three weeks after Trinity, nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world had entered the atomic age in the desert near Alamogordo.