In New Mexico: Voices from Trinity

By 7:45 Saturday morning, 150 cars are lined up bumper to bumper, lights on —station wagons, Mustangs, Winnebagos from places like Indiana, North Dakota and Ohio. A couple from Florida in a rented car wait for the motorcade to begin. The husband fidgets nervously with his movie camera, anxious to get to the Trinity site, the 432 sq. mi. of desert where the world's first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945, at precisely 5:29:45 a.m., Mountain War Time. Once a year the site is opened to visitors. "We've been looking forward to this for a long time," the man says. "The whole atomic thing began during my lifetime, and this is kind of romantic."

In the parking lot, members of the Alamogordo Chamber of Commerce busily hand out leaflets warning that radiation on the site is still above average levels. A booklet adds that it is only one-fifth as great as the radiation received from a chest X ray. No eating, drinking or smoking is permitted within the ten-acre, fenced-in area around ground zero, lest radioactive materials be ingested. "What's a little radiation?" scoffs 14-year-old Lee Hutchinson, visiting Trinity for the second time. "It's bad at Three Mile Island because that's in the middle of civilization. But this is really in the middle of nothing."

It certainly is. One hundred and fifty miles from the southern border of New Mexico and just over 100 miles from Alamogordo, the site lies between two jagged mountain ranges in a valley named by the conquistadors Jornada del Muerto (Dead Man's Walk). It is remote and entirely unpopulated, the perfect testing ground for the plutonium monster that the "longhairs" were concocting at Los Alamos in 1944. That winter Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, was pressed to give the site a code name. The erudite scientist glanced down at some lines of John Donne's poetry in a volume that he had been reading: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God." "Trinity," he said over the phone, "we'll call it Trinity."

The flash of what Winston Churchill called the "second coming in wrath" could be seen as far as 250 miles away.

The blast was heard 50 miles away. Its explosive power was as great as that of 20,000 tons of TNT.

This morning, in mock-funeral fashion, the motorcade of atomic-age pilgrims solemnly winds its way past whorls of dust and yucca bushes to reach the 6-ft. Cyclone chain-link fence that surrounds the blast area. Among the pilgrims, some 1,700 of them, are mothers and babies, parents and grandparents, families of three and four who scurry out of cars, Minoltas in hand, eager to record for posterity the "place where it all began." What they see is nothing much. The original 400-yd., 25-ft.-deep crater has long since been filled in to prevent further radiation. The "pearls of Trinity" — ceramic-like green glass, or Trinitite, formed from the sand by the enormous blast of heat — have been mostly buried or stolen by souvenir hunters. A few relics remain, though, sparkling in the pale sun, and visitors still filch them, cramming the radioactive rocks into their pockets.