"The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, or absence, our coming, our staying, or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of no concern whatsoever to the desert. Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelop the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas - the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time to take a different and better course. I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into greenish glass - already the grass has returned, and the cactus and mesquite. On this bedrock of animal faith I take my stand, close by the old road that leads eventually out of the valley of paradox."
Edward Abbey, from “Desert Solitaire”
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I’ve never actually seen a nuclear explosion. I’ve seen pictures and movies of them, but that doesn’t really count. I’ve seen pictures and movies of invaders from outer space, and everybody knows they don’t exist. I’ve never even seen a nuclear weapon that I know of. I wouldn’t even know one if I saw it unless someone of authority said, “Now, this, here, is a nuclear weapon.”

But I do believe nuclear weapons exist. Their existence has been a more or less oppressive and fearful cloud on my worldview ever since, as a child, I fully understood the actual physical possibility of nuclear Armageddon. At times, like when Ronald Reagan was president, this caused me actual nightmares. Other times, when Bill Clinton was president, for instance, I could go for weeks without even thinking about mushroom clouds, gamma rays or boiling human flesh.

Those rosy days of The Blue Gap Dress and Pets Dot Com gave way to the waking nightmare of the George W. Bush Era. Box cutters, the mail, and even our own National Security Apparatus became weapons of mass destruction. With the punch line, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” the oppressive and fearful cloud had made its triumphant return to my life.
So in the spring of 2007, at a loss as to how otherwise regain my naturally sunny outlook on life, I decided to fight fire with fire. I decided to take an interest in nuclear weapons, to learn everything I could about them. I re-read Richard Rhodes’s magnificent work “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, which I first read during the Reagan years. I read Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s excellent biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer”. I read Jonathan Schell’s book “The Unconquerable World”. And I visited Trinity Site.
Trinity Site, where the fist atomic bomb was exploded on the 16th of July 1945 at 5:29:45am, is unspectacular and unforgettable. Located in central New Mexico on the White Sands Missile Range weapons testing area, it is open to the public twice a year, on the first Saturdays of April and October.

Saturday April 7th, 2007, between Good Friday and Easter, was cold and overcast. Early freezing rain and gusty winds gave way to stiff, steady breezes, biting cold, and a dull cloudy sky by late morning. It was an odd day for a family outing to a piece of God-forsaken desert in a high-security military installation.

There were many families among the scores of individuals who undertook this peculiar pilgrimage. The road into the site from the north enters the missile range at a bleak turnout called Stallion Gate, adjacent to the Stallion Airfield. A line of vehicles was backed up at a security checkpoint overlooked by a brooding hillside bristling with radar domes and antennae. A pair of greeters, (middle aged white woman and bulky gregarious black man) bundled in thick overcoats against the cold, handed out information pamphlets including rules of conduct and safety precautions. A few yards further in, at a bulletproof guardhouse, MPs armed with automatic weapons checked picture IDs and asked every driver if there were any weapons of any kind, concealed or otherwise, contained in the vehicle. They then instructed the drivers to continue the seventeen-mile drive to the site without stopping.

A couple of miles past the airfield, after crossing a cattle guard, there was a pair of diamond-shaped yellow signs on either side of the road bearing the distinctly odd, long-horned, silhouette of an oryx. None of the explanatory literature had mentioned the fact that from 1969 to 1977 the New Mexico Game and Fish Department released 93 Oryx onto White Sands as part of its exotic game animal introduction program. The population of this resilient species of antelope is now estimated at 1,700, and can go indefinitely without drinking water, getting necessary hydration from vegetation. It was startling and logical to see their image beside the road to a place that remains somewhat more radioactive than the surrounding lands.
From there the route took the stream of vehicles into the featureless plane between the Rio Grande River valley, twenty-five miles east, and the Oscura Mountains eight miles west. After sixteen miles the crest of a small rise offered a view of the large parking area that looked like it should sit in the shadow of a sports arena. From a mile away, no structure was visible; only a bustle of cars, motorcycles, SUVs, RVs, and buses parking, surrounded by barbed wire, under the stern watch of armed MPs. People got out of their cars shook the stiffness of a long drive out of their legs and winced against the bitter chill.

It did not take long for the novelty of being at the place where the technology that gave mankind the physical means to destroy human civilization and most life on this planet was first tested to wear off. A wide gravel walkway leads one-quarter mile from the parking lot to “ground zero”. The crater is barely noticeable. Nowadays there is only slightly more radiation in the area compared to the surrounding desert: An hour-long visit is safer than a chest x-ray. The monument marking the exact epicenter of the explosion is rather puny looking and dryly matter-of-fact. Visitors looking for physical evidence of the explosion found only a small chunk of cracked concrete with a twisted, melted piece of rusty iron re-bar, and some pea-sized crumbs of trinitie –the pale green pumice-like glass that was formed when the detonation carried sand aloft, vaporized it in the super-nova heat before condensing it into a molten rain as the explosion’s temperature subsided. The cavity caused by the test has been filled and the Atomic Energy Commission has carted the majority of the trinitite away for containment.

The White Sands Missile range had trucked a mock-up of “Fatman” –the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, to the site. Military history buffs (whose vehicles carried “support our troops” stickers) meandered around the truck bearing this prop and conversed in loud voices about “kill rates” and “megatons”. Liberals just stood before it in postures of sullen judgment. Military personnel posed for pictures. The story-tellers took photos and jotted notes.

Once the novelty wore off, most people headed back to the parking lot, discussing options for lunch. The stubborn few determined to reach some conclusion about the meaning of their quirky Mecca to this place turned their collars up against the cold wind and introspected.

Introspection is about the only thing one can do in such a spot. To say the landscape outside the chain-link and barbwire around the crater is “desolate” is to give it more drama than it deserves. A more precise adjective would be “banal”. It is true that if someone were to get lost out there in the summer heat (temperatures routinely climb to well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit), without water, they would die. It does feel far from anywhere. Early Spanish explorers named the valley “Jornada del Meurto” –the journey of death- because it is so dry and therefore dangerous. In spite of the lack of water, the land does support scrubby vegetation, some wildlife –rabbits, hawks, and, nowadays, herds of oryx. There are plenty of places, some of them not far away, that are more bleak, fearsome. So Hollywood would not have chosen this set for a dress rehearsal for Armageddon. The lack of drama leaves plenty of room for thought.

Contemplating the fact of the terrain lead me to a creepy state of mind. It happened here for “pragmatic” reasons. As Richard Rhodes describes it in his seminal history “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, “The hard work of finding a proving ground sufficiently barren and remote and organizing it fell to a compact, close-cropped Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth W. Bainbridge. His task, the Los Alamos technical history notes, ‘was one of establishing under conditions of extreme secrecy and great pressure a complex scientific laboratory in a barren desert.’ He needed a flat, desolate site with good weather, near enough to Los Alamos to make travel convenient but far enough away to obscure obvious connection.” Simple as that. Neither aesthetics nor attunement to telluric energies had anything to do with Bainbridge’s choice.

The creepiest thing about the development of nuclear weapons, outside of ideology and idealism, is the pragmatic logic and course of history that led to it. The landscape of the Jornada del Muerto is a perfect reflection of such pragmatism, a place devoid of anything that might inspire moral or emotional considerations –unless one were dying of thirst there. It is a clinic where men could get the job of testing an atom bomb done without being too bothered.

The men who undertook the task of turning nuclear physics into a deliverable bomb cannot be accurately described as “amoral”. Most of them were in fact idealistic and liberal minded. The historical context, mixed with the somersaults of their brilliant intelligence, coerced them into this ultimate Faustian bargain. They saw themselves as confronted by the murderous tyranny of Hitler’s Nazis and Japan’s rapaciously depraved paranoid territorial and economic ambitions. They knew too much about the state of science and industry to doubt that the Axis armies were trying to develop such weapons. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project had studied at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the 1930’s with Werner Heisenberg, the director of the German bomb program. The arms race was a symptom of industrialization. Nobody had any illusions that either Germany or Japan would hesitate to use such technology to win the war. So these idealistic, liberal-minded men went about their work to create a device for mass slaughter with particular zeal. Trinity Site is the theater where the final act of their idealism, perverted, was played out.

It is somewhat romantic, but not unreasonable, to conclude, after scrutinizing this place on earth, that it was waiting for such a thing to happen. Whether or not one accepts the evidence of evolution, no one can sanely deny that human history can be seen as an ongoing acquisition of more knowledge about and increased means of shaping the world. Perhaps this is the central purpose of humanity. If that is the case, coming to possess the knowledge to build and test destructive devices capable of ending the “human experiment” was inevitable. Someday, somehow, someone was going to learn how to do this.

On November 2, 1945, three months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Robert Oppenheimer said as much when he addressed an auditorium at Los Alamos packed with the idealistic, liberal-minded scientists he had directed in building the bomb, who were by then wrestling with the moral “fallout” in their consciences. The event is described in “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin:

“What has happened, he said, has forced us ‘to reconsider the relations between science and common sense.’ He spoke for an hour -much of it extemporaneously- and his audience was mesmerized; years later, people were still saying, ‘I remember Oppie’s speech…’ They remembered this night in part because he explained so well the welter of emotions they all felt about the bomb. What they had done was no less than an ‘organic necessity.’”

Did the “good guys” get there first? Is it “unpatriotic” to pose such a question? Will nations continue, in the face of increased economic disparity and the environmental stresses of global warming, to choose not to pull this ultimate trigger? Trinity Site, on the bland desert of the Journada del Muerto Valley stands as a mute fact in the face of these questions. If building a bomb was an “organic necessity”, this piece of land was the necessary place waiting for it to take root.

Robert Oppenheimer chose to call it Trinity. Years after the fact he tried to remember his inspiration for the name. He said he might have had in mind a poem by John Donne that has the line, “Batter my heart, three person’d God…” As a young man, shortly after he had received his doctorate in physics, Oppenheimer was looking for a new challenge, so he decided to learn Sanskrit to be able to read the Bhagavad-Gita. This also might have inspired his choice based on the Hindu trinity of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer.

People travel to this otherwise unremarkable, homogeneous spot in the desert because they know its history and portentous name. If the road, parking lot, barbwire and dinky monument were taken away, the place would be hard to find. The desert has covered the scar. But the implications of what happened there are still of urgent concern.

My experience of visiting Trinity Site did lead me to a kind of consolation. No one person is to blame. Every individual has a role in shaping the world. Even though I am not dead yet, I do believe everyone is going to die, eventually, including me. I believe this the same way I believe in the actual existence of nuclear weapons and non-existence of alien invaders from outer space.

The last book I read on the topic was Jonathan Schell’s “The Unconquerable World”. In it he arrives at a most promising outcome of the development of nuclear weapons:
"In sum, the days when humanity can hope to save itself from force with force are over. None of the structures of force -not the balance of power, not the balance of terror, not empire- can any longer rescue the world from violence, now grown apocalyptic. Force can only lead to more force, not peace. Only a turn to structures of cooperative power can offer hope."

“Batter My Heart” by John Donne (1572-1631)
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.