Thousands Visit Trinity Test Site For 70th Anniversary of First Atomic Blast

HughPickens.com writes The NYT reports that thousands of visitors converged Saturday on the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico where the first nuclear bomb was detonated nearly 70 years ago. Many posed for pictures near an obelisk marking the exact location where the bomb went off and were also able to see a steel shell that was created as a backup plan to keep plutonium from spreading during the explosion. "It brought a quick end to World War II, and it ushered in the atomic age," Erin Dorrance said. "So out here in the middle of nowhere New Mexico changed the world 70 years ago." Pete Rosada, a Marine Corps veteran, drove with another military veteran from San Diego to make the tour. Rosada said he previously visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese targets of atomic bombs during World War II after the test at the Trinity Site. "This completes the loop," said Rosado.

Tourists who joined a vehicle caravan out to the site at a school in Tularosa were greeted by demonstrators from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders who came to protest the 70th anniversary tour. The Downwinders is a grass-roots group that has set out to bring public awareness about the negative impacts of the detonation of the bomb. Henry Herrera was 11 years old when he got up to help his father with the car on that fateful July morning in 1945 and says the dust from the blast scattered all over Tularosa, remembering how his mother had to wash clothes twice that day due to the fallout dusting the family's clothes line. "I stop to think I'm one lucky, fortunate guy because I'm here and so many are dead," says Herrera. "Gobs of people from around here died and nobody knew what they died of, they just went to bed and never woke up." Albuquerque resident Gene Glasgow, 69, visited the Trinity Site for the first time with relatives from Arizona. Born and raised in New Mexico, he said he'd grown curious through talking to people who witnessed the explosion, including one man who was laying trap line in the mountains at the time. "He thought the end of the world had come."

Comments

Yeah, Heh Heh

[Greyfox]

Hey you guys! Remember back when we spread all that radioactive fallout all over your state? No one gave a shit about a little radioactivity, or asbestos, or rivers catching on fire, or whether you could actually live in the environment. Good times!

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[TWX]

We probably would have just spent considerable resources carpetbombing and firing battleship guns at them, long before setting foot on any of the main Japanese islands. Remember, by this point in the war the United States had figured out how to use radio for shell detonators; they were being used in antiaircraft weapons predominately but were used as antipersonnel shells too. They would detect an object and explode on detection. For antiaircraft use that was the aircraft itself, and for antipersonnel use it was the ground or the building it was fired at. I'm guessing that if the atomic bombs hadn't been developed or if their development had stalled further, new bombs and new shells designed to set fire to the predominately wooden structures that most Japanese people lived in would have replaced many of the high-explosive bombs used for military targets. Burn down the neighborhoods. Burn down the government buildings. Burn down the factories. Use the conventional bombs on the hardened military targets.

If such a scenario had played-out and the Japanese government had not surrendered and instead chosen to right for every inch of territory, then I do expect that all of those purple hearts would have been needed, and it would have been a lot bloodier for both sides, but arguably far worse for the Japanese than for the Americans and allies.

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[Penguinisto]

We probably would have just spent considerable resources carpetbombing and firing battleship guns at them, long before setting foot on any of the main Japanese islands.

Well, that or put a lot less aircraft and ships at risk by carpet-bombing Japan with atomic weapons. Mind you, we only had 3-4 total, and spent one on testing and two on targets... but the Tojo government didn't know that. All that hot air about how everyone would fight to the last man, woman, and child withered very quickly once the full horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came to light... and they realized that each happened from just one bomb, dropped by just one airplane. Morale pretty much evaporated at that point, to where (IIRC) the Emperor stepped in (via intermediates) and told them to surrender once and for all.

It's one thing to die fighting your enemy head-on for honor, glory, etc. - such a thought has driven many doomed men to fight like tigers, in spite of all the certainty of death. It's another thing entirely to be exterminated without a second thought, by an enemy using weapons that you could not hope to hide from, let alone fight back against.

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[johnjaydk]

For some insane reason, I've been binge reading books related to the Manhattan project. The takeaway is that much of the time they were flying blind or wearing blinders due to the extreme time pressure.

Sometimes they were plain reckless. The criticality experiments is a good case; adjusting the distance between two semi-critical cores with a screwdriver jammed in between. Great fun until the screwdriver slipped and the core went critical. Didn't go boom but killed a guy. For good measure they repeated the experiment and killed another guy.

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

They knew that radioactivity was lethal. I think that may have been the point of using it in a bomb.

You think wrong, buddy boy. The point was the whole E=mc^2 business that meant one single measly bomb gave off a really gigantic boom. The residual radiation was completely incidental, at least at the time.

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[slew]

We probably would have just spent considerable resources carpetbombing and firing battleship guns at them, long before setting foot on any of the main Japanese islands.

Probably should review your history. The short story, the US dropped the bomb to win the peace, not the war...

By the time the US dropped the bombs, they had *already* spent considerably resources firebombing Tokyo (including "Operation Meetinghouse" in March which was bigger than Dresden) to the point that most military commanders thought that there were no more high-value targets left in the city target (and other cities were then targeted). This was long before the nuclear bombs which were detonated in August...

I think many professional historians have become to realize that it was actually unnecessary to actually drop the bomb to conclude the war (it could have ended in a war of attrition as Japanese industrial war output had estimated to have dropped 90% from January to June of 1945), but the capitulation of the military was unlikely before the Russians would have become engaged in the Pacific War. The bomb was essentially dropped to hasten the end of the war to end the Pacific Theater War on the US terms (rather than risk a negotiated eastern block situation that occurred in Europe in the aftermath of the war).

Historical documents indicate that Prince Konoye was already favoring ending the war in February due the on-going strategic bombing campaigns which were devastating the country and the Emperor was favoring ending the war after the "Meetinghouse" firebombings in March, but the military rejected US requests for unconditional surrender until after the A-bombs were dropped in August. FWIW, Russia declared war on August 8th and invaded Manchuria on August 9th (3 months after the war in europe concluded as agreed to by Stalin in Yalta and coincidentally the same day the 2nd bomb was dropped).

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[Hognoxious]

Or they could just have detonated the bombs in uninhabited or sparely populated areas

They dropped one on an actual city, and that wasn't a strong enough hint so they had to drop another one on another city.

This makes me suspect that if they'd put one across the bows the response would have been along the lines of "Ha! Missed, aah-sole!"

and then threatened to use them against the mainland.

I'm not sure they had many spares, if they had any at all.

Or just waited a bit longer for the Japanese to give up because the people were literally starving

So instead of killing them, they should have killed them slowly.

it was clear to many at the top of the government that the war was already lost.

So clear that they had to be nuked twice before the penny dropped.

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[Tablizer]

Yeah, everyone knows you use duct-tape for that instead of screwdrivers.

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[TWX]

My point was that a Dresden-style bombing campaign would have expanded to the entire archipelago, urban and rural, and that the islands would have been reduced to a moonscape. Tokyo as it had been was destroyed, but there was a lot more of Japan left that hadn't been razed that could have been. Japan obviously hadn't surrendered to terms that the United States was willing to accept, and if the Japanese military was not ready to lay down arms then any internal debate amongst the Japanese couldn't really be considered by the US military. Fact of the matter is, we simply don't know how much continued firebombing and carpetbombing would have been necessary to force the Japanese military to accept their government's desire to surrender. If they hadn't been willing to surrender after the destruction of Tokyo then perhaps the bigger stick in the form of nuclear weapons was necessary.

I'm a little curious as to how quickly the Soviet Union could have entered the fray in useful strength. They had such a fight on their hands taking out Germany that I expect the bulk of their men and materiel were literally at the opposite end of the continent, and the Russian East has never been especially well developed. I expect it would have taken considerable time to shift all of the personnel, equipment, and supply lines to prepare for a meaningful assault on Japan. They also had the little matter of attempting to put large portions of their country, right up to their capital, back together after the pounding they took from the Germans.

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[TWX]

If I remember my history correctly, there was only one more uranium core left by the time the Device, Little Boy, and Fat Man were used.

If what others in this thread have said is accurate, it sounds like the government of Japan wanted to unconditionally surrender after the firebombing of Toyko, but that the military was against it and probably would not have gone along with it had the government tried. The atomic bombs and the significant destruction they created made it clear that more total destruction would be coming in a cold, mechanized way. Didn't matter that the United States was effectively bluffing, we'd demonstrated that we could do it twice, so they couldn't count on us not being able to do it more times.

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[Applehu Akbar]

Not to mention the creepy way that Werner Heisenberg would intone "Let's cook!" as he gave the order to assemble each new bomb. Heisenberg's increasingly erratic behavior caused the OSS to ease him out of the project and erase any record that he had ever been involved in it. After the war, he retired to open the first carwash in Albuquerque.

Re:Yeah, Heh Heh

[Mal-2]

The first bomb was dropped to intimidate Japan into a surrender. It was working. The plan was already being drawn up, and this fact was not kept secret.

The second bomb was dropped to give the Soviets second thoughts about trying to invade eastern Europe, and it is this second bomb that many living Japanese consider excessive and unforgivable, not the first -- because they had to live with the consequences even though they weren't the real target.

Downwinders' misguided protest

[mbeckman]

The Tularosa Basin Downwinders came to protest the 70th anniversary tour? Yet The Downwinders' aim is to bring public awareness about the negative impacts of the detonation of the bomb? Seems like an anniversary tour is a perfect opportunity for that. Why protest people who had nothing to do with the testing, and only have historic interest? Should we protest Civil War reenactors? I sympathize with their plight and don't approve of government misdeeds, but the Downwinders shame themselves.

Context

[Livius]

Bad things happen in war.

In a way, it's a good thing that people have luxury of forgetting that.

Demonstrators

[aardvarkjoe]

Tourists who joined a vehicle caravan out to the site at a school in Tularosa were greeted by demonstrators from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders who came to protest the 70th anniversary tour. The Downwinders is a grass-roots group that has set out to bring public awareness about the negative impacts of the detonation of the bomb.

So what do these demonstraters hope to accomplish? Are they going to protest hard enough to prevent the test from happening in 1945?

Re:Funny

[ScentCone]

So, 3000 years ago, rick landowners were actually lower middle-class guys getting their heads pounded into the sidewalk? That explains a lot.

Re:Atomic Blast

[binarylarry]

"I'm so excited my lips and eyeballs are tingling like spiderman!" said one excited attendee.

Re:*alleged* fallout?

[spauldo]

I was mostly talking about the fallout. You notice Pripyat hasn't been rebuilt.

Had the fallout been a lot worse, Nagasaki and Hiroshima would have been cordoned off.

I'm actually surprised they rebuilt, honestly. There are large parts of Okinawa where nothing gets built. I was under the understanding that it's a religious thing - they believe that the spirits of the dead from the battle there still occupy those sites, and building there would upset them. Okinawa tends to be cane fields, urban sprawl, and wilderness. A lot of people died at the two bomb sites, so you think they'd have abandoned them.

(Disclaimer: I lived in Japan, but do not claim to be an expert in their religion)

Re:*alleged* fallout?

[0123456]

I was mostly talking about the fallout. You notice Pripyat hasn't been rebuilt.

Bomb fallout decays rapidly because it's mostly short-lived isotopes from the explosion. Reactor fallout takes much longer, because it's mostly due to isotopes with much longer half-lives. On the plus side, because of that, the initial radiation level would typically be much lower.