Two fun ways to blow up this October.
In the early morning hours of July 16, 1945, at a remote site on the White Sands Missile Range, an atomic bomb was detonated for the first time, forever changing the way the world would look at war.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
author Richard Rhodes tells SFR that as he was writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning
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book, "I thought of the story I was going to be telling as the great tragic epic of the 20th century, trying to think as an historian but also trying to cast it in a literary mold as a tragic epic. There's something about the whole business about harnessing nuclear energy in the form of a weapon that merges in somewhere deep in the human psyche with the whole business of apocalypse and Armageddon. All of those really old, basically religious concerns and ideas get attached to this highly technological story, romantic story, frightening story."
In order to tell and preserve that story, the non-profit Atomic Heritage Foundation will take over Los Alamos for an October symposium, "The Manhattan Project Legacy of Los Alamos: Creativity is Science and the Arts," at which Rhodes will be one of the many speakers. The symposium commemorates nuclear history through a series of educational lectures and tours of the Bradbury Science Museum and Oppenheimer home.
The symposium also will include the dedication of sites that are currently located behind the tight security of Los Alamos National Laboratory, but which the foundation hopes will someday be accessible to the public. Preservation of inaccessible sites is beginning now
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because so few have been preserved up to this point and there aren't many left to save for the future. The dedication of the Los Alamos "V site," a small building that was used in the assembly of the bomb tested at Trinity, is just one of the many projects the foundation is working on with the National Park Service to preserve Manhattan Project locations within New Mexico and around the country.
In order to dedicate the site, the Heritage Foundation has invited guests to give a bit of background on the history of the Manhattan Project. In addition to Rhodes, speakers include
The Day After Trinity
's producer and director Jon Else and composer John Adams, whose opera,
Dr. Atomic
, had its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera in October 2005.
Rhodes tells SFR he is excited to be involved with the preservation effort because "as things move backwards in history there is a tendency to mythologize and simplify. I've noticed that poor Nagasaki barely gets mentioned anymore. One hundred
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years from now it's going to be one city, Hiroshima; one place [involved in the building of the bomb], Los Alamos; one person, Oppenheimer; and one bomb." For Rhodes, anything that can be done to preserve the story now and keep it from being "stripped away of its detail" must be done.
One Manhattan Project site that already has been preserved, and will be open to the public the same day as the symposium, is the Trinity Site in White Sands Missile Range. Twice a year, the first Saturdays in April and October, the Trinity Site opens from 8 am to 2 pm. Visiting Trinity is a powerful experience, even though there is very
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little there, the main event having dissipated into the atmosphere more than 50 years ago.
What is left at Ground Zero is a large circle, surrounded by wire fencing, the casing of the larger of the two types of atomic bombs (Fat Man) and an obelisk of Trinitite (the result of sand melting in the radioactive heat of the blast) that is marked with a plaque commemorating the date of the test. According to the official White Sands Web site (
www.wsmr.army.mil/pao/TrinitySite/trinst.htm
), the radiation levels at Trinity are extremely low and there is no danger in visiting, though the physical and emotional effects of the blast can still be seen and felt in grass that doesn't grow quite the same as it does on the other side of the fence.
A short bus ride from Ground Zero is the McDonald House Ranch, a small home constructed in 1913, which was
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used to assemble the bomb before detonation. Its windows were blown out during the blast but, at two miles away, the structure remained relatively unscathed. Visiting the house provides an educational experience in both the history of atomic testing and American life in the early 20th century.
Besides being an opportunity to learn something, this fall is a rare chance to see some super-secret government stuff without sneaking in and risking disappearing forever.
