Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by samzenpus on from the big-boom-and-fun dept.

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."

8 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, Heh Heh by Greyfox · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    1. Re:Yeah, Heh Heh by johnjaydk · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      TCAP-Abort
    2. Re:Yeah, Heh Heh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Yeah, Heh Heh by slew · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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).

    4. Re:Yeah, Heh Heh by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    5. Re:Yeah, Heh Heh by Mal-2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
  2. Context by Livius · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Bad things happen in war.

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

  3. Re:*alleged* fallout? by 0123456 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.