Cliocide at Trinity, New Mexico

On July 16, 1945, people up early in Las Cruces witnessed a world-shattering event. At 5:29 a.m., they saw a bright flash in the northwest over the San Antonio Mountains.

Those in the Tularosa Basin at the same time saw a bright cloud rise like the sun and then fall. In wonder, they then watched as the real sun rose in the east. These New Mexicans had witnessed the world’s first atomic explosion.

Ancient Greek philosophers had theorized about an indivisible unit of matter which they called an atom. Einstein’s E=mc2 predicted that if an atom was split, an enormous amount of energy would be released. In 1938, German psychists Hahn and Strassman discovered how to split an atom spreading fear that Nazis had leapt ahead in harnessing atomic power for a devastating weapon. 

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. created the Manhattan Project which picked Los Alamos, New Mexico as the central research lab to create atomic weapons. To create such an explosion, scientists identified two elements to work with —Uranium and Plutonium.

At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a process extracted the rare isotope of Uranium235 from natural ore. Plutonium required a different method. At Hanford, Washington, Uranium ore was bombarded by neutrons which produced Plutonium, a new man-made element.

Scientists at Los Alamos experimented with both Uranium and Plutonium to create an atomic bomb. Scientists shot a plug of Uranium235 into a larger amount of enriched Uranium which split atoms, released neutrons creating a chain reaction, and caused a powerful explosion. Scientists nicknamed this bomb Little Boy.

This did not work for Plutonium, so the lab came up with an innovative technique — an implosion bomb. Scientists surrounded the core of plutonium with a larger sphere of conventional explosives. When detonated at the same exact moment, a 3-D shock wave converged on the Plutonium core, compressing atoms and throwing off neutrons causing an atomic explosion. They called this device Fat Man.

By summer 1945, scientists were convinced that Little Boy would work but were not so sure about Fat Man. So, they left Los Alamos to go test the “Gadget” in the desert of the Tularosa Basin.

Some of them worried about setting the atmosphere on fire with a run-away explosion consuming all humans on the earth. In ancient Greece, Clio was the muse of history. If the atomic explosion got out of control, it could mean the death of history, thus Cliocide.

Early that July 16 morning, Fat Man imploded in the desert of New Mexico. The flash from the blast lit up the pre-dawn sky, witnessed by people in New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and Mexico. At the closest observation bunkers 5½ miles away, silence lasted for 30 seconds. Then, a shock wave knocked down anyone standing that close. A seismologist 50 miles away said it felt like an earthquake, and some windows shattered 120 miles away.

Joan Hinton, a graduate student from Wisconsin, observed the explosion from a hill 25 miles away.

“It was like being at the bottom of an ocean of light,” she said. “We were bathed in it from all directions. The light withdrew into the bomb as if the bomb sucked it up. Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up…. Then suddenly the sound reached us. It was very sharp and rumbled and all the mountains were rumbling with it.”

Chemist George Kistiakowsky speculated "that at the end of the world--in the last millisecond of the earth's existence--the last men will see what we saw."

Fat Man detonated with the equivalent force of 36,000 pounds of dynamite. With the test successful, Fat Man and Little Boy bombs headed to Japan to end the war.

In August 1945, the U.S. detonated the Little Boy bomb over Hiroshima and the Fat Man over Nagasaki. In both Japanese cities, thousands of people vaporized at the moment of detonation from the heat of the man-made suns, leaving their shadows burned onto concrete sidewalks and buildings. Thousands more died from shockwaves as buildings collapsed on them or debris struck them. Tens of thousands more perished from the fire storms that ravaged the atomic landscapes for days afterwards. Newspapers of the day reported that one atomic bomb packed the equivalent destructive force of 2,000 fully loaded B-29 bombers.

Hiroshima’s death toll from the Aug. 6 bombing totaled 60,000 to 70,000 dead while between 40,000 and 50,000 died on Aug. 9 during the Nagasaki blast. Tens of thousands more people succumbed to radiation exposure in the weeks and years that followed. Facing such devastation, Japan surrendered on Sept. 2, ending the horrific war which killed 70,000,000 people worldwide. Hundreds of thousands of US veterans would have died if invading Japan became necessary to end the war, and the islands’ civilian loss would have been as high.

In addition to this quantum leap in destructive power, atomic weapons introduced a new lethality to the world. Atomic explosions released gamma rays which radiated humans, burning their internal organs. These damaged organs failed to process the vital fluids necessary for life, and people died, often taking weeks to painfully succumb.

Atomic blasts also scatter unexploded Uranium and Plutonium in fallout downwind which when breathed or ingested can cause cancers and other health issues – sometimes decades later.

Above-ground testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War scattered radioactive fallout over much of the globe. Plutonium remains toxic for over 24,000 years, Uranium for over a million years.

Back in the Tularosa Basin, this radioactive fallout continues to harm those living downwind from Trinity as various cancers and birth defects continue to plague the community. To counter this, the federal government passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act which has distributed over $80 million to New Mexicans who have documented cancers and other diseases from radiation exposure.

For more information about RECA, visit The Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (https://www.trinitydownwinders.com/).

A new film, We First Bombed New Mexico, is a sobering account of the cancer cluster affecting people of Tularosa and the surrounding area because of the Trinity test. The health and environmental legacies of Trinity and all our nuclear weapons’ production will affect humans and the earth for thousands of years to come.

Historians in the future will look at the creation of nuclear weapons as perhaps the most important event in the 20th century — that is if we don’t commit Cliocide.

This year, the Trinity Site on White Sands Missile Range is open to the public on Oct. 17. For more information on visiting Trinity’s Open House, go to https://home.army.mil/wsmr/contact/public-affairs-office/trinity-site-open-house.