It was 1 am on July 16, 1945, when J. Robert Oppenheimer met with Army Lieutenant General Leslie Groves in the parched landscape of Day of the Dead, the journey of Dead Man, a remote wilderness in New Mexico.
A group of engineers and physicists was about to detonate an atomic device filled with 13 pounds of plutonium, a nuclear weapon the government hoped would end World War II.
According to the researchers, some scientists on the project were concerned that they were about to set fire to the entire world. Others worried that the test was “a total failure.”
Oppenheimer, who was commissioned to design an atomic bomb for the Manhattan Project, had not slept.
At 5:29 am local time, the device exploded with a power equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT and activated a flash of light that would have been visible from Mars, investigators said.
It was the first nuclear test in history.
Less than a month later, the United States would drop an almost identical weapon in the city of Nagasaki in Japan.
The bomb, called Fat Man, fell three days after the Americans dropped a uranium bomb, called Little Boy, in Hiroshima. Both weapons immediately killed tens of thousands of Japanese and forced the surrender of Japan on August 14, abruptly ending the war.
Since the Trinity test 75 years ago, at least eight countries have conducted more than 2,000 tests of nuclear bombs, said Jenifer Mackby, a member of the Federation of American Scientists. More than half of those tests have been conducted by the United States, a legacy of the Trinity explosion, as the United States and other countries have continued to refuse to ratify the treaty that prohibits test explosions of nuclear weapons.
“You could say it unleashed the nuclear age, really,” Mackby said. “It unleashed a whole new kind of destruction.”
According to historians, many of the scientists who witnessed the explosion quickly realized the “gross and awesome” power they had unleashed.
Oppenheimer said that a Hindu script passed through his mind upon seeing the explosion: “Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Kenneth T. Bainbridge, the testing director, was less poetic.
“Now we are all motherfuckers,” he said.
The top-secret test was heard and watched for miles.
The goal of the test was to see if the military could take advantage of the plutonium in a weapon that would destroy entire cities, said Alex Wellerstein, a scientific historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, who studies the history of nuclear weapons.
Most scientists on the project did not fully understand the effects of radiation at the time, according to historians, and the preparations that were made to keep civilians safe reflected that ignorance.
They placed raw monitors around small towns within 40 miles of the test site. A scientist who was seven months pregnant and her husband, who was also a scientist, were sent to a motel in one of the cities with a Geiger counter, a device used to detect radioactive emissions, to measure radiation. If the needle hit a certain mark, she was ordered to alert officials so they could evacuate the city, Professor Wellerstein said.
Authorities did not warn any of the residents, many of them ranchers, Navajo, Mexican settlers and their descendants who raised cattle and drank tank water, about the trial. If anyone asked about the explosion, officials came up with several cover stories, including telling the public that a remote munitions depot had exploded, Professor Wellerstein said.
“They made an effort” to protect the public, he said. “Would we consider it appropriate today? Not at all. It is not considered appropriate to blow up a nuclear bomb, not tell anyone about it, and set up a pregnant scientist in a motel with a Geiger counter to monitor radiation. “
The blast surprised baffled small-town residents within a 50-mile radius of the site.
“It produced more light and heat than the sun,” said Tina Cordova, founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which urged the government to do more research on the consequences of the blast and to compensate affected communities.
According to census data at the time, the consortium estimates that there were tens of thousands of people living within a 50-mile radius of the explosion, Cordova said.
“Ash fell for days afterwards into the landscape and in all directions and in surprising amounts,” he said.
The warnings were invisible and ignored.
The day after the explosion, Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, sent a petition signed by 70 scientists to President Harry S. Truman, urging him to give Japan a chance to surrender before dropping the bombs.
“Therefore, a nation that sets the precedent for using these newly released forces of nature for the purpose of destruction may have a responsibility to open the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale,” the petition warned.
It was not the first reason to reconsider the use of a nuclear bomb to end the war.
A month before the test, a committee, which included Dr. Szilard and was chaired by German scientist James Franck, released the Franck Report, urging the United States to first demonstrate the power of arms to members of the Nations United.
Such a demonstration, according to the report, would tell the world: “You see what weapon we had but did not use. We are ready to give up its use in the future and join other nations to achieve adequate supervision of the use of this nuclear weapon. ”
Mr. Truman did not see Dr. Szilard’s request and probably did not see the Franck Report, said Steve Olson, who wrote a book on the development of plutonium in the Hanford nuclear reserve in southeast Washington state.
“It is very difficult to conceive of a set of developments in 1945 that would have avoided dropping those bombs,” Olson said. “Truman wanted to end the war as quickly as possible.”
The United States wanted an “unconditional surrender” from Japan, he said. “Government leaders thought it was going to require a psychological shock.”
There were repercussions and regret.
The bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima are believed to have killed some 200,000 people, and many of those victims succumbed to radiation poisoning in the following weeks.
The scientists “were totally shocked when the Japanese reported on radiation sickness in Nagasaki,” said Professor Wellerstein, who wrote about what the United States knew about the long-term consequences of using weapons.
While the scientists were concerned about the possible effects of radiation on their own staff, they showed little interest in calculating what the harm might be for the Japanese, Professor Wellerstein said.
He added that they hoped that “the effects of the explosion and the fire from the atomic bomb would greatly overshadow any radiation victim.”
The destruction of the cities would haunt Mr. Oppenheimer, who was concerned that he had set a course for a future apocalypse.
“Sir. President, I feel like I have blood on my hands,” she told Mr. Truman later that year.
The true effects of the test on people living near the test site remain unclear.
The government never conducted a full investigation into the effects of radiation, even after communities downwind of the explosion saw an unusual increase in child deaths in the months after the explosion, said Joseph J. Shonka, a scientist and one from the authors of a 2010 study on the effects of nuclear testing for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Trinity downwinders have not been treated fairly or fairly, “he said.
Ms. Cordova, who grew up in Tularosa, NM, said the cancer had been widespread in the cities near the Trinity test site, where everyone can name someone who died of the disease.
“We know that the government basically left and has not been held responsible for suffering and death. “ Said Ms. Cordova, who survived thyroid cancer and has several family members who died of various forms of cancer.
Members of the New Mexico Congress have introduced legislation that would expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, It compensates uranium miners and upwind people from nuclear test sites, to include residents who lived near Trinity.
In 2014, the National Cancer Institute began interviewing people who lived in cities near the test site to try to document the effects of the explosion. The institute said it planned to publish the results “in the coming months.”
