Looking Back: At Trinity, the First Nuclear Bomb Test - 1945

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At Trinity, the First Nuclear Bomb Test

William L. Laurence at Trinity

July 16, 1945

Observing the "great burst of flame" that gave birth to the age of nuclear weapons:

"With the flash came a delayed roll of thunder heard, just as the flash was seen, for hundreds of miles. The roar echoed and reverberated from the distant hills and the Sierra Oscuro range nearby, sounding as though it came from some supramundane source as well as from the bowels of the earth. The hills said yes and mountains chimed in yes. It was as if the earth had spoken and the suddenly iridescent clouds and sky had joined in one affirmative answer. Atomic energy - yes. It was fascinating and terrifying, uplifting and crushing, ominous, devastating, full of great promise and great foreboding."

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SJS/GreenPolicy360 Siterunner:

The blast of the first atomic bomb occurred at dawn on July 16, 1945 in what is now called Trinity, New Mexico.

At that time the area was a vast desert named "Jornada del Muerto" for a journey of deaths it had brought to Conquistadors who'd arrived centuries earlier looking for gold.

The first atomic bomb test, triggered by the Los Alamos scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer, left a 800 meter diameter deep crater with a "glistening encrustation of blue-green glass". (Read the story below of what this crater looked like shortly after the explosion, as seen by a nuclear-weapon bomber crew on a training mission.) The scientists huddled the night before in the distance in a bunker had been wagering whether the nuclear explosion would 'catch the atmosphere on fire'. It didn't and those who gambled it would, lost.

After recording what had happened that day, the military quickly covered over the crater with desert sand 'for security reasons', burying the remnants of the molten blue-green crystalized debris that would later be given the name -- "Trinitite" .

The official line of the US Army was an "ammunition dump" had exploded. The news agencies duly reported the lit up sky at the break of day as an "accident".

The Newspaper Cover Story .

The flash seen in the distance by some in Albuquerque was noted in the news -- then forgotten...

...How the Hiroshima bombing is taught around the world.

"In Hiroshima, Echoes of the Past and Future" by Janna Malamud Smith

http://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2017/06/janna2-1000x791.jpg

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At Trinity / Trinitite

Posted by GreenPolicy Siterunner / SJS

August 7, 2015 at 8:42pm

Trinitite - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/trinitite

SJS / Siterunner:

As I look back at the Nuclear Era, and writing about nuclear risks since my teen-age years and debating nuclear proliferation in high school debates in California. Congressman George Brown was a source of much information as we began a three-decade long working relationship that spanned from nuclear and Vietnam war risks to big science and the beginnings of the environmental movement. Later, the beginning of an international Green party in Germany began serious political work at forefront of the Cold War nuclear chasm, and my work grew to include peacetime campaign platform work with Gov. Jerry Brown, who is nowon the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative / NTI. Later, I went on to the drafting of the founding US Green Party platform, with anti-nuclear weapons peace planks, and establishing StrategicDemands.com / A New Strategic Vision.

(2015)

GreenPolicy360 Siterunner, Steven J. Schmidt

Recalling My Father's Nuclear Flyover and Training Mission'

My father, Joseph Schmidt, in World War 2 was a bomber pilot who toward the war's end was trained to fly "secret missions." He spoke to me, on rare occasions, about his training and B-17/29 "special" assignments in New Mexico.

One day and one story stands out in my memory, a day he recalled flying his crew over "White Sands" and a "crater in the middle of nowhere". Posterity tells me to share his story as my dad has passed away. These are war stories of a young man from a Kansas farm, now a skilled construction engineer in Los Angeles. My father was talking to me of bomber training... flights across Texas and New Mexico to Marfa, Roswell and then there was Ardmore/Clovis/Alamogordo -- B-17s and B-29s -- and he spoke of missions to the Pacific...

It was in July 1945. At that time my father was a Lieutenant based in New Mexico's Clovis Army Air Field. He was scheduled, as I look today at his yellowing papers with orders in his Army Air Force trunk, to transfer to Alamogordo on July 23rd. Curiously, I see a number of destinations on his orders are blank. I remember how he told me that he knew and his crew knew, in their own way, about the first test of a nuclear weapon. They knew it had happened not far from their base and on July 17th newspapers in New Mexico had reported that a "munitions storage depot" had exploded. This was the official line to explain the bright flash in the sky at dawn on July 16th, south of Albuquerque.

The initial testing of the first nuclear weapon was at Trinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test) in a barren area of New Mexico known as Jornada del Muerto ("Journey of the Dead Man"). The desolation made it the choice of the Army and scientists who had secretly developed the bomb at the isolated nuclear physics laboratory at Los Alamos.

The B-17 crew that flew that week from Clovis decided (in a departure from the official planned flight path) to veer "off course" and to take a look at the area where the bomb went off... not a good decision, but in those days many of the pilots and crews were strong willed to put it mildly. This crew chose to go where they thought the site of the blast was... They scanned the horizon and in the distance they saw a bright glistening spot in the desert.

They flew over it. He told me it was both frightening and beautiful. It was a crater scattering radiating beams of light up.

The crater from the blast shocked them into silence he remembered. The sand had turned liquid then fused and fallen back to earth. The crater was coated with a 'glass' that would be called "Trinitite".

They flew on without talking, he said. The power of the weapon all too evident. No more fly-boys on a run.

Now they knew what their bomber group, their B-29s, and their special runs with unusual maneuvers were being equipped to do. The military covered over the crater and evidence of the blast.

Then they heard the news, August 6th and 9th, 1945, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

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Today it's August 2015 ...

Seventy years on and I remember how my father told me of his relief there were to be no more atomic bombings -- and hopefully no more wars with nuclear weapons.

He had trained as a warrior with nuclear weapons. He said it had gone too far. He was, we were, fortunate to not suffer the consequences as others have, even as a sword of a Damocles or worse continues to hang over our heads as a result.

Generations in the future have to deal with the potential consequences of the nuclear age.

The words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the atomic weapons project for the U.S., continue to echo …

"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

The Legacy of the Bomb

July 2023

Via the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Fighting a nuclear war is equivalent to national suicide. Make that planetary omnicide.

In the words of Daniel Ellsberg, who passed away last month:

“What is missing—what is foregone—in the typical discussion and analysis of historical or current nuclear policies is the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral: in its almost-incalculable and inconceivable destructiveness and deliberate murderousness, its disproportionality of risked and planned destructiveness to either declared or unacknowledged objectives, the infeasibility of its secretly pursued aims (damage limitation to the United States and allies, “victory” in two-sided nuclear war), its criminality (to a degree that explodes ordinary visions of law, justice, crime), its lack of wisdom or compassion, its sinfulness and evil.”

US nuclear policies are sheer madness and must be completely reconsidered.