Come with us now to a stretch of lonely desert in New Mexico during the latter days of World War II. Under extreme secrecy, there’s activity here that involves the country’s top military officials and some of the best minds in the world, scientists steeped in cutting-edge physics at work harnessing a nuclear chain reaction that will result in the first atomic bomb.
That’s the story that Janet Farrell Brodie tells in her book, “The First Atomic Bomb—The Trinity Site in New Mexico.” The action takes place 220 miles south of Los Alamos, the government’s secret laboratory where the Manhattan Project sought to develop a new weapon on untold power.
Before the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war with Japan, the atomic weapon was tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945.
As we soon learned when the bombs leveled two Japanese cities, the test was successful if you consider it a success coming up with the deadliest weapon ever conceived.
But just as the new movie, "Oppenheimer," reveals, the testing that took place in New Mexico faced plenty of obstacles. "It was a case of extreme secrecy. Everything had to be routed to avoid the possibility of a potential spy or noisy neighbor finding out what was going on. They used fake addresses and fake names," said Brodie.
The secrecy that cloaked the test site remains to this day, she said. While open to the public, it's only for a few hours on just one or two days a year. "There's nothing really to see but quite beautiful desert," said Brodie who told Steve Tarter that she and her husband paid a visit to the site on the designated day several years ago.
There were actually two tests made in the desert, she said. The first, called "the 100-ton test," using only "a little bit of plutonium" "shocked some scientists" with the amount of radioactive particles that were released, she said.
After the Trinity test proved successful two months later, atomic components were immediately on their way to Japan, said Brodie. "Everything was rushed." she said.
Brodie describes the atmosphere at the time of the test and the work that surrounded the project, building roads, dealing with neighboring residents (who lived miles away) and the interaction among the scientists, themselves.
The author also touches on Operation Paperclip in her book, the code name for the project that brought some 1,600 German scientists, technicians and their families to the United States following the war, helping develop U.S. weaponry as well as assisting the American space program at NASA.
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