Trinity Tour

Today my father and I went down to see the Trinity Site, the penultimate act of the Manhattan Project.  In this lonely isolated valley on July 16th, 1945, the Manhattan project successfully detonated the first nuclear weapon ushering in the atomic age.  The public is only allowed in 2 days a year, on the first of October and the first of April.  The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History organized a tour of the site lead by very knowledgable docents who were scientists or military personel who worked or were involved in the project.

Yeah, it is really an isolated location.

We departed at 6 am and drove the two hours south and on to the White Sands Missile Range where the Trinity site is located.  We first stopped at the McDonald House where scientists from Los Alamos assembled the plutonium weapon.  It was then brought two miles away to the top of a 100 meter tower. All personnel were then evacuated about 6 miles away and the bomb was detonated.

At the McDonald House

It was a fascinating day.  Lots of deep thought about the level of human achievement that was required to get this thing to detonate so spectacularly on that dark summer morning.  Within 6 years of embarking on the project, scientists and engineers developed the scientific theories, the engineering expertise, synthesized fissionable uranium and plutonium, and got everything and everyone to work in cooperation to realize this staggeringly difficult task.  Just the scope of it boggles the mind.  Even though I work at a lab that was directly involved with this incredible achievement, the scope of the problems and projects I work on are so tiny and inconsequential compared to this it makes me truly humble.  Whether you think of the dawn of the atomic age as one of mankind greatest achievements or most horrifying development, the scientific feat of these men and women makes you amazed about ability of the human mind and the limitless infinity of science.

It also made you think just to stand at a location of such cataclysm.  It is one thing to stand on a long dormant lava field and think millions of years ago would not be a good place to be.  It is quite another to stand at the epicenter of a man made Armageddon  distant by only 67 years.  At the actual site, you can still see pieces of trinite, the glass that was fused by the immense heat of the explosion.  Most of it was removed and buried long ago.

The actual site, the obelisk in the distance is the epicenter.

After that we travelled on to Soccorro to visit the New Mexico Tech University's Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center for a demonstration of conventional high explosives.  It is a site that is probably most famous for its many collaborations with Myth Busters, but also is known the world over for its explosives training on first responders, police, swat, and military personel.  It also conducts many tests regarding different explosive scenarios  which was evident in the multitude of blown up tanks, vehicles, building, equipment, and unidentified pieces of mangled metal as we drove back into the 45 square mile test range.  They did five controlled explosions, from conventional blasting paste used in the mining industry to military grade plastic explosives.  Totally being a 14 year old boy here, but it was really cool! 

It also puts the mornings tour in context.  The biggest explosion at the test site was only 4 pounds of conventional diesel fuel and fertilizer mixed to make a bomb.  We were observing from behind a concrete and earth bunker 300' away looking through a periscope through 4 inches of glass.  This small explosion was incredibly loud, but more than the noise you actually felt it internally as the shock was passed through your body.  Scale that up by over 1000 times to and you have the devastation of the Oklahoma City bombing.  This bomb, that killed so many and caused so much damage, was only a 0.002 kiloton explosion.  So scale up the tiny 4 pound bomb by a factor of ten million (10,000,000x) to get to the 20 kiloton explosion of the Trinity site.  These kind of numbers really don't make sense to the human mind, as we cannot grasp the vastness of such a scale.  That, pretty much, was the take away from the weekend.