![]() ![]() ![]() It feels like we’re on a pilgrimage.Īs we near ground zero, I hear Geiger counters clicking as they register radioactive material. People around me make small talk, but their voices are hushed as though we’re walking through a museum. I fall in line with visitors walking the 0.3-mile-long path toward the ground zero marker, and the atmosphere feels anticipatory. The Gadget is unloaded at the base of the tower for the final assembly. The site’s notoriety has grown and today, more than 2,000 people come to pray, learn, sate a morbid curiosity, or simply check it off their bucket list. In 1952, the DoD opened the site at the request of area churches, whose members wanted to visit and pray for peace. On the first Saturday of April and October each year, the site opens its gates and the public may visit a place that has forever shaped warfare, espionage, and global security. The White Sands Missile Range is the largest open-air land test range operated by the Department of Defense (DoD). Ground zero still lies within a working military installation. For a time, a rumor circulated that it was the bomb blast that had turned the sands to the south pure white. ![]() The Trinity Site is understandably remote, wedged between two mountain ranges and the bleached hills of White Sands National Monument, the world’s largest gypsum dune field. To get here, I traveled the same route that Manhattan Project scientists followed from Los Alamos nearly 75 years ago over the cracked, rabbitbrush-studded landscape. Less than a month later, the same style of bomb was detonated on Nagasaki, Japan, instantly killing more than 80,000 people. It was here that the atomic age dawned at 5:29:45 a.m. Here, more than 100 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city, is the Trinity Site, the location of the world’s first nuclear bomb explosion. As soon as I see the protest signs proclaiming “Trinity victim!” and “Make peace, not war,” I know I’m in the right place. ![]()
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