Last fall my hubby and I were able to stand where the first nuclear bomb was tested. It’s a sobering place – at least for some visitors.

Others, posing for giggling photos, seemed to think it was some kind of theme park attraction. They clearly had no idea of the significance of where they were prancing around, of the first detonation of the most terrible weapon ever invented. We just shook our heads and tried to ignore them.

The Trinity test site sits way 35 miles out in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto Desert. Meaning “Route of the Dead Man” (labelled as such by Spanish conquistadors), the 400-year-old name seems eerily prescient in the blinding light of what would happen there at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945.

Three years before that, with fears that Germany was already developing their own nuclear weapon, the Manhattan Project was created to develop one faster for the United States. If you go to see the upcoming movie Oppenheimer, you’ll learn much more about the development of “The Gadget”, the deeply-understated name for the bomb whose test launched our world’s entry into nuclear weaponry, than I could post in this blog.

What I can show you is what it’s like to visit the actual site, which is located on the White Sands Missile Range within easy driving distance of Alamogordo, New Mexico. As part of a U.S. military testing area, the Trinity site is open only two days in the entire year, in early April and mid-October. The U.S. Army website has all the information you need to find the Trinity site, either as part of a vehicle caravan from Alamogordo (which accepts only the first 125 vehicles, and departs at a fixed time – around 7:30 a.m. if I remember correctly), or by driving to the northerly Stallion Gate off U.S. 380 any time between 8:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. The Trinity Site closes at 3:30 p.m. for another six months. There’s a detailed map on the Army website; we didn’t have any problems finding the Stallion Gate.

Currently there’s an advisory on the Army site that, with the release of the movie later this month, higher visitor numbers are expected in this year’s October “Open House”, so if you’re thinking of going, I’d check the site regularly for updates.

One other thing you should be aware of is the identity requirement. The U.S. is putting in place something called REAL ID, which, according to the Department of Homeland Security website, establishes “minimum security standards for state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards and prohibits certain federal agencies from accepting for official purposes licenses and identification cards from states that do not meet these standards. These purposes are:

• Accessing certain federal facilities
• Boarding federally regulated commercial aircraft
• Entering nuclear power plants”

The Trinity Test Site falls under “certain federal facilities”. As Canadians planning to visit, we had a very confusing time trying to determine if any of our I.D. would qualify. We ended up using our NEXUS cards, which stymied them a bit at the Gate until we pointed out that the cards are issued by Homeland Security. Anyway, the deadline for the REAL ID implementation has been extended to May 7, 2025 (from this past May), so Canadians and other non-Americans should be able to visit Trinity without difficulty before then. On the Army website it currently says that “Foreign nationals must present a valid passport.” (You can read more about REAL ID on the DHS website).

Once you get to the Stallion Gate, you embark on a long road into a barren landscape surrounded by low mountains that seems the perfect choice to carry out the test.

However, you’ll probably see protesters crowding the Gate, as we did. Many of them are locals complaining about the residual effects of the nuclear testing to this day on area residents. There was so much internal pressure on the scientists of the Manhattan Project, and complete secrecy, that I get the sense no one worried about the local effects, apart from a general concern that the heat from the test might accidentally set the entire atmosphere of our planet on fire and burn away the oceans – but then, there’d be no one left to complain about it.

The Trinity site is very hot and dry, and there’s a quarter-mile walk from the rudimentary visitor centre and parking lot to the actual location, so I highly recommend wearing a hat and bringing plenty of water to drink.

In the parking lot, you can see part of the rusted shell of Jumbo, a steel containment vessel in the event of an unsuccessful explosion. The Gadget was originally supposed to have been placed inside Jumbo, from which the bomb’s plutonium could be retrieved if the test fizzled. However, the powers-that-be decided not to use Jumbo after all, because a successful detonation, whose magnitude they had no idea of in advance, might either vaporize the steel casing, making it hard to analyze the effects, or send fragments flying around, which would be dangerous both to the observers and the measuring equipment.

The bomb was hoisted to the top of a 100-foot steel tower, to approximate being dropped from a bomber (better detonation in the air). Mattresses were laid on the ground below in case the cable holding the bomb were to break.

Scientists and other personnel placed wagers on how well the bomb would actually work, from complete dud to an explosion equivalent to 18 kilotons of TNT. Two men were responsible for taking photographs of the entire thing. Oppenheimer and the other personnel were ranged around the test area in bunkers 5+ miles away.

The end result exceeded the highest estimate by 7 kilotons, and completely vapourized the steel tower supporting the bomb. Apparently the fireball reached 100 million degrees in temperature. The roar of the shock wave was felt over 100 miles away, and the mushroom cloud that was created reached 7.5 miles high. The light from the explosion cycled through different colours, from white, to yellow, then red, then purple.

According to signage on the self-guided tour at Trinity, the explosion made a crater eight feet deep and 800 yards in diameter.

Much of the surrounding sand was instantly turned into a greenish glass that became known as Trinitite. Collectors have made off with most of it over the ensuing decades, until the U.S. Government finally put a stop to that. You can still find small, roughly dime-sized bits around the site if you look very closely. It can be picked up safely, but there are plenty of soldiers on site to ensure you don’t make off with any.

Along the back fence there are a series of photographs that graphically illustrate the immense power of the bomb. At only 1/20^th of a second – less than a blink of the eye – a massive mushroom cloud had already formed, and in hardly another blink later the photo looks like hell on earth.

Oppenheimer and the other scientists were elated with their success, but almost 80 years later it just seems horrific. That numerous nations have such power at the push of a button is not a comfortable thought. Let’s hope no one ever uses it. The results at Hiroshima and Nagaski were terrible enough, as well as in places like Shinkolobwe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the bulk of the uranium used in developing the Trinity bomb was mined (regardless of the toxicity to the miners and other community members).

It seems the people of New Mexico have more cause for concern: 2,000 feet deep under their sands, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project is storing massive amounts of nuclear waste. When the facility finally fills up (estimated in ten to twenty years), the rock caverns that contain all the waste will be collapsed and sealed with both soil and concrete. But the waste will remain lethal for over 300,000 years – longer than humans have been walking the earth – and the largest current concern is how to mark the spot and warn of its contents for generations far in the future. You can read more about this eerie project on the BBC Future article How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time.

I suppose only far distant time will tell how wise or foolhardy it was to develop nuclear power. Maybe its discovery was inevitable, but there’s a wise old maxim that goes something like this: just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.