Part III - A place called Trinity... in the Valley of the Dead...

“Thunder is good. Thunder is impressive. But it is lightning that does the work.”  Mark Twain

(Above: The United States tested only one bomb, the 19 kiloton plutonium bomb code-named 'The Gadget'. It was suspended and detonated from a 150-foot steel tower which vaporized during the successful trial.)
 

(Above: The run up to the test. Note: There is no sound with this video.)

(Above: Documentary film referring to the Trinity Test.)
 

(Above: The heat was so intense that it fused the sand on the desert floor into glass shards called Trinitite. Today, there remains very little of the Trinitite that has not been removed by thieves and history buffs seeking a piece of real history.)



(Above: "The Gadget" up close. Future Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory

 Kenneth Bainbridge is pictured at left.)

            The Trinity test site was located in a deserted area called Jornada del Muerto ("Journey of the dead"), in southern New Mexico about 225 miles south of Los Alamos. The nearest dot-on-the-map was a crossroads called Alamogordo. Today, this area is under the control of the United States Air Force and is known as the White Sands Missile Test Range. As a national historic site, twice a year, the Trinity site is opened to historians and regular citizens to visit.
 

(Above: Trinity was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1975. The site is opened to the public twice a year, the first Saturday in April & September. The site consists of 51,500 acres; however, it is also located on the northern end of the 3,200 square-mile White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. Cameras are allowed at the Trinity Site, but their use is strictly prohibited anywhere else on the White Sands Missile Test Range.)

(Above: Detonation plus 16/100s of a second & spans approximately 300 yards.)

            “Suddenly, without any sound, the whole world lit up. When I came to my senses, I was lying on the ground with my back to where the light was coming from. I put my hands over my eyes to protect them and I could see the bones in my fingers. It was as if I was looking at an X-ray. It was as if someone had turned the sun on with a switch.”   Daniel Yearout , then a Private in the US Army and an eye witness
            Local media were told that an ammunition dump had blown up on an army base in the area. The test was code-named Trinity, supposedly after a poem by John Donne which begins: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God”. The Gadget was a Plutonium-239 like the one detonated over Nagasaki. It was detonated on 16 July 1945 at 05:29.45 - half an hour before daybreak. The test was 1 ½ hours late due to a sever thunderstorm that moved through the area.

            The minimum distance from hypocenter to the nearest human being was 6 miles (most were further away) where the scientific community was stationed in bunkers. There were scientists that did not think the blast would/could split atoms – causing a chain reaction; then Edward Teller (Hydrogen Bomb creator) thought a successful detonation/chain reaction could possibly ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world.

             The test bomb, at the flash point, reached a temperature of between 2 & 3 million degrees centigrade (conventional bombs reach 500 degrees C which means the test bomb was between 4000 to 6000 times hotter).

            At .1 millisecond it cooled to 300,000 degrees C. (Iron melts at 1536 degrees C. – or almost 200 times hotter than the point iron melts.)
             The luminosity reached not quite 10 x the brightness of the sun. (Later, Japanese victims located miles from the point of detonation, had the retinas of their eyes wielded to the pupils causing instant, permanent blindness.)
             The flash was visible for approximately 180 miles, audible for approximately 160 miles, at 120 miles glass panes broke out of windows, and at 10 miles the heat was like “opening an oven door”.
             All that power was the result of 1/30th of an ounce of P-239, the fissionable material. 

            Even before the test was executed in the desert near Alamogordo, the United States had sent the Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy (U-235) on the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis to Tinian Island in the Pacific. Once it arrived at Tinian, the bomb was loaded into the belly of the pressurized B-29, Enola Gay.

            Although the largest aircraft in the world, to manage the sheer size and weight of the bomb (almost 5 tons) the B-29's bomb-bay had to be retrofitted. The first pressurized bomber, the B-29 could also fly higher than the Japanese Zero could reach. Lastly, it had the fuel capacity to reach out to cover the distance and deliver the weapon to its target. Even so, Tinian Island had been the scene of heavy combat costing a great deal of bloodshed for both sides, Japanese and American. It was the island’s geographic location and size that made it so critical to the US Atomic Bomb mission. Tinian was both close enough to the Japanese mainland and large enough for the huge B-29 to be accommodated with the required longer runway.
            Recall that Colonel Paul Tibbetts had been training the 509^th Composite Bomb Group to deliver the weapon to the appointed target in Japan. That story is part IV of the series.

            "The atomic bomb is the Second Coming of Wrath." British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill’s statement, upon being informed that the Trinity Test was successful