The Original Radioactive Desert

Walking the world’s first nuclear ground zero

It makes sense that the military uses New Mexico to practice blowing things up. The state is miles and miles of empty desert, practically a wasteland already.

That’s easy to forget when you live in Albuquerque, a city bursting with turquoise and chile and drivers who cut you off at intersections. When I hit I-25 South on the morning of April 2, I met a fair amount of traffic in the downtown area — signs of civilization.

Within an hour, though, I was in a moonscape of mesas and blindingly blue sky.

Signs of life reappeared briefly when I pulled off the highway in San Antonio, but from there another twelve miles of road unwound barrenly eastward. I might’ve missed the turnoff for the White Sands Missile Range if not for the sudden burst of color and activity at its corner: protesters.

“We are the Tul — ” Their placards blurred past too quickly for me to finish reading them. So it goes in the southern half of the state: Expanses of nothing, then a burst of an event that passes before it’s understood.

Seventy-one years have passed since the Manhattan Project culminated in the globe’s first nuclear blast, which lit up southern New Mexico’s pre-dawn darkness on July 16, 1945. The test was code-named Trinity, mastermind J. Robert Oppenheimer’s poetic nod to that which most Westerners held to be all-powerful.

Theology aside, the name fits. Three sites labored for years as the creative forces in the Manhattan Project. Hanford, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos constituted a powerful triumvirate.

It took a fourth site and a single day to blow it all up. Even as he acknowledged the project’s trio of creators, Oppenheimer declared himself a fourth deity after Trinity’s stunning, history-making explosion: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Waiting in line at the security checkpoint to enter White Sands Missile Range

The Tularosa Downwinders and their unreadable signs disappeared in my rearview as I drove another five miles to a security checkpoint. I’d reached the northern edge of White Sands and was crossing…