1620 Hours—July 16, 1945 (Ten Hours Fifty Minutes After the Gadget’s Blast)
The beta-gamma meter in Carrizozo goes off scale. So much radiation is in the north part of the Tularosa Basin that scientists openly debate evacuation. Monitors continue to chase the Gadget’s fallout cloud beyond Carrizozo but lose radio contact with base camp at Trinity. They are not equipped with long-distance radios. They never expected to chase the fallout so far.
The Army has drawn up plans for evacuating everyone within a forty-mile radius of the blast, if necessary. The evacuation would include Carrizozo but not Tularosa. But their evacuation plans contain little more than maps of villages and ranches in the area—a sham plan to pacify concerned scientists. The Army would never risk exposing their big secret. Tomorrow they’ll discover ranches covered in fallout that they had no clue existed because even their maps were a sham. But for now the radios are silent, the fallout monitors out of contact. And no evacuation is ordered. The official reasoning: There is no immediate threat. But if some evacuations are ordered now, perhaps fewer people will collect fallout-tainted rainwater from their roofs, fewer people will slaughter irradiated cows or swallow those cows’ fresh milk. They will think twice about harvesting their vegetables growing along arroyos flowing with ash. But no evacuation is ordered. Four decades from now one of the doctors who discovered the M. C. Ratliff ranch caked in fallout will pen a memoir that says, “A few people were probably overexposed, but they couldn’t prove it and we couldn’t prove it. So we just assumed we got away with it.”
July 14, 2015
Four days before the downwinders’ vigil, two days before the seventieth anniversary of the Gadget’s blast, and I’m at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo because the New Horizons spacecraft has made a 3-billion-mile journey to Pluto and the man who discovered that lonely rock, Clyde W. Tombaugh, lived in these parts and his ashes are on that spacecraft and this is a ceremony to proclaim today Pluto Day forever after in the Tularosa Basin. In the gift shop of the museum they sell T-shirts sporting a fiery mushroom cloud and the slogan HAVE A BLAST AT TRINITY, NM. This is perhaps an object of the nuclear uncanny like George’s koozie of John Wayne, but it is also just a dumb-ass cash grab and bad humor to boot and the kind of thing whose real value is only in helping us identify with some certainty the morons in our lives because they are the ones proudly wearing the shirt that reduces the whole complex human triumph/tragedy of the Gadget to a corny and insensitive pun. I buy the shirt anyway (size medium, $25.99), but only because I know that at times it is comforting (and empowering and necessary for getting out of a supreme depression) to reduce immense tragedy to a corny pun. But even as you read this, I will not yet have worn the shirt because it will only work once, will only help defuse one imponderable paradigm shift toward greater savagery before it becomes inert like the ugly Christmas sweater at the back of the closet that will never bring you joy again. Sometimes, when so many wars and murders and rapes are on the news, the Trinity T-shirt will call out to me from the drawer, but I will never convince myself that this is as bad as it’s gonna get and so I leave it for another day. Mostly I forget it exists.
The museum has only a few exhibits on the Gadget, saving most of their space for space. But recently I found an AP story from November 12, 1945, that reminds me how our explorations of space are totally intertwined with the Bomb: “Hap Predicts Space Ships Dropping Atom Bombs”: “General Hap Arnold advises that atomic bomb warfare waged from interstellar space ships is ‘within the foreseeable future’ … Said he: ‘War may descend upon us by thousands of robots passing unannounced across our shorelines—unless we act to prevent them.’” We haven’t yet waged war on invading robots with spaceships, but we’ve got plenty of spaceships and they’re going far, fueled by the same stuff that made the Gadget blast.
New Horizons uses a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) to power its over-3-billion-mile journey. The RTG runs on about twenty-four pounds of plutonium. Though it is not quite the same weapons grade as the fifteen pounds of plutonium that made the Gadget blast, it’s a nuclear power whose origins can be traced to the science of the Manhattan Project and Trinity. And the whole Manhattan Project was a model for Kennedy’s moon shot in the sixties, was the only real predecessor of NASA, was proof of how the highly regulated concentration of scientific minds under the pressure of military conflict could change the trajectory of human existence.
Also, there’s the rather obvious Pluto connection: the planet is named for the Greek god of the underworld, and the element plutonium is named for the planet. Apparently the naming of the elements neptunium and uranium had started a pattern that could not be broken, a pattern of naming the little things we were discovering after the biggest things we had already discovered. But plutonium’s once-removed connection to the god of the underworld manages to fit too. The underworld of Pluto was often described by the Greeks as being in perpetual darkness, and the planet is far enough from the sun to be in perpetual darkness, and the element in the form of the Bomb has the ability to one day cast us all into, you guessed it, perpetual darkness. But the ancient god of the underworld was not an entirely bad guy, and though he controlled your fate after death, it was not necessarily a depressing afterlife—there were plenty of fields in which those who had won the god’s favor could frolic. Pluto could offer rebirth and was often considered the god of wealth because he was in the ground from which agriculture and minerals arose. So too is plutonium by turns terrifying and generous. I sit in the theater at the space museum watching video from New Horizons’ trip to the edge of our solar system and know that the Gadget’s legacy, the legacy of the primordial element at its core, includes both the means for escaping our home and the means for destroying it.
In the theater, gobs of schoolchildren hold up little models of New Horizons and signs that say WE LOVE PLUTO and PLUTO IS OUR PLANET!!! Technically, scientists have demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet, but in SNM we are stubborn, and proud because Pluto was discovered by one of us—we cling to its glory days as if it were a far-flung chunk of our own desert home. The mayor reads a proclamation declaring this day Pluto Day at the exact moment the video feed from NASA declares the spacecraft is passing by the outer planet, snapping souvenir pics.
In two days, NASA will release the first close-up images of Pluto taken by New Horizons, and the world will adore its newfound intimacy with this distant, oft-spurned peewee orb pockmarked by nitrogen glaciers. It will be on the front page of The New York Times and you will not be able to scroll through any Net feed without seeing its gnarly surface in amazing detail. On July 16, 2015, we will be in love with the face of Pluto, and almost no one will mention that on this exact same day, seventy years ago, the Bomb took its first breath at Trinity.
July 16 is one of those uncanny days. In it you can already see forming the history of our species’ running from its biggest mistake, its own destruction. When the lucky few of us look back at the history of Earth, we’ll be like, Damn. July sixteenth was an uncanny day. Our president of Mars will gather us in our habitat bubble and give a speech like this:
On this day in 1945 at 0530 hours the first atomic explosion occurred, solidifying our fate. On this day in 1965 we obtained the first close-up photos of Mars, where we now live. On this day in 1969 Apollo 11 launched toward the moon, really beginning our history of travel to other celestial bodies. On this day in 1979 at 0530 hours, ninety-four million gallons of radioactive waste spilled into the Puerco River from a uranium mine in Church Rock, New Mexico, the largest single spill of liquid radioactive waste in U.S. history. We have been morons, my fellow Martians. On this day in 1980 Ronald Reagan was nominated by his party as a candidate for president and would eventually preside over a massive nuclear arms buildup even as he signed nuclear disarmament treaties that would, on this day in 2014, be declared defunct. We have been morons. On this day in 2015 the first close-up photos of Pluto are transmitted to Earth, on the seventieth anniversary of t
he first atomic blast, showing a planet all cratered and brown, finally solidifying our suspicion that all worlds were just as cold and desolate as our own.
Along with the ashes of Tombaugh, New Horizons has another memorial of sorts, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter. This instrument is named after the British schoolgirl who, in 1930, suggested Tombaugh use the name Pluto for his newly discovered planet. She liked that the new planet, like the god of the underworld, seemed to disappear even though we can always sense its pull. Because she named the planet, Venetia is also indirectly responsible for the name of the element that fuels the spaceship carrying the dust counter named after her, responsible for the name of the plutonium at the core of the Gadget that made it go boom. What a thing to pin on a little girl! She was eleven when she thought of the name, the same age as Henry Herrera when his momma blamed the Bomb on him.
The purpose of the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter is unclear. The instrument is meant to study—detect but not collect—how much dust is in the universe and the densities and fluxes of that dust’s dispersion, but no one yet knows what might be learned from this data. For now, New Horizons sails through that distant perpetual darkness like an impotent vacuum, finding so much dust but not knowing what to do about it.
0900 Hours—July 16, 1945
(Three Hours Thirty Minutes After the Gadget’s Blast)
One hundred and sixty enlisted men in vehicles spread out around Trinity, around Socorro and along highways to the north and west. Twenty-five members of the Army Counter Intelligence Corps are in towns within a hundred-mile radius, mostly to manage people if they get jumpy at the sight or sound of the blast. About this time, some enlisted men a few miles north of Trinity get a reading on their Geiger counter that makes them anxious. They immediately abandon the steaks they’ve grilled as part of an Atomic Age birthday celebration, going so far as to bury the meat underground for fear of radioactive contamination. A handful of enlisted men chasing the fallout south, toward Carrizozo and Tularosa, have been given respirators and they make use of them because the radioactive dust of the blast has begun to coat everything. At least one soldier forgets a respirator in his haste to chase the cloud, and as soon as the needle on his Geiger counter begins to twitch, he takes the officially sanctioned precaution of breathing through a slice of bread.
Some of these soldiers on fallout duty are equipped with gear for sampling the environment for later tests—mason jars for collecting soil samples and FilterQueen vacuum cleaners to suck fallout from the air or the sill of a restaurant window or the sleeve of a shirt. The FilterQueen 200 was introduced in 1939, the first vacuum to use centrifugal force to suck and trap dirt. An upgraded version can be used to filter or freshen air, spray paint, dry hair, sand wood, or polish floors, and, it seems, to collect nuclear fallout. The FilterQueen is a squat little beast of a machine with a hose attachment, the ads for which are everywhere in the 1940s and show housewives dancing with the machine or show the Filter Queen herself, a regal woman whose torso is the actual bulky canister of the vacuum, with the hose around her bare legs like a spiraling hoop dress. And so this is quite literally what transpires in a hundred-mile radius after the first-ever atomic blast: soldiers breathing through bread and carrying around FilterQueens, vacuuming up the fallout. Despite all that hard work, the dust collected by the FilterQueens will never be analyzed or tested. The jars will sit in storage until they are forgotten and lost.
July 10, 2015—Noon
I sit at the bar at Applebee’s in Alamogordo next to Barb, a lifetimer in the Tularosa Basin, a white-haired lady who’s a ton of fun on account of her sour disposition. She sits every day at the Applebee’s bar beginning sometime before noon, sits here in her bathrobe, a shabby, molting vermilion situation. She’s dolled up underneath the bathrobe, frilly shirt and a good bit of turquoise, but the frumpy bathrobe is how she chooses to finish off the outfit because nobody in SNM owns a real coat and she is freezing my ass off here every day, she yells at no one in particular, since they started blasting the goddamn AC. She points up at the air vent in the ceiling and shakes her finger at it and says, A demon lives there and every day I am battling that demon. She takes a sip of beer. I only just met Barb, but I agree our Applebee’s is a little bit haunted.
On the wall behind Barb, Applebee’s has installed a mural of the Trinity Site, not a picture of the Gadget’s blast but just a picture of the monument to the test, a lava obelisk that now sits out in the desert of the missile range. Also in the mural is a road sign that is in reality nowhere near the obelisk. The sign, as signs do, explains things: “The world’s first atomic explosion occurred on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity Site near the north end of the historic Jornada del Muerto. It marked the beginning of the nuclear age, and the culmination of the Manhattan Project. The site, now part of the White Sands Missile Range, is closed to the public.”
Surely you know all about Applebee’s quest to be your neighborhood bar and grill since 1986. This quest involved widespread deployment of a highly nostalgic décor, little red wagons and old baseball mitts and rusty rifles and lots of tin signs for gas stations, all manner of stuff that suggests the general feeling of the old white owner’s ideal of an American neighborhood. Sometime around the year of our Lord 2010, Applebee’s launched a revitalization campaign intended to make their nostalgia blitz more specific to each of the over two thousand neighborhoods in which their restaurants operated. I do not know the intricacies of the process they must have used in those two thousand neighborhoods to ensure that each of their chain restaurants incorporated exactly the right amount of location-specific nostalgia to make all the rest of the crap on the walls seem unique too. But I don’t imagine there was much careful consideration of the political or moral contexts surrounding those decisions because most of the revitalization choices are pretty banal. For instance, my experience at a wide range of Applebee’s throughout the Southern, Southwestern, Midwestern, and Western regions of America suggests that most of the Applebee’s revitalizations consisted of hanging recent team photos from the local high school’s sports programs on the wall. But here in Alamogordo we have a mural, a whole wall complete with overhead spotlights, dedicated to the stretch of desert where the Bomb took its first breath, memorializing not even the Bomb or its mushroom breath or its creators but just memorializing the memorial itself, the obelisk made of lava rock that stands in the place of the Gadget’s test. And memorializing also, for some reason, a road sign about the memorial. The choice of the obelisk and sign suggests they (whoever is at the top of the Applebee’s pecking order for this particular restaurant or region) had an actual conversation about the possible implications of memorializing the invention of the world’s deadliest weapon on the walls of their family-friendly, community-centered, happiness- and nostalgia-obsessed eatery, a place that has, for over two decades, had the primary goal of offering so many generic food, drink, and décor options that it quite literally became so bland that it no longer seemed to belong anywhere and required location-specific revitalization. These Applebee’s regional middle managers said to themselves, Oh, let’s not show the destructive power. Oh, that might be in poor taste. Oh, let’s not even reconsider, though, the idea to memorialize the thing that will likely bring the world as we know it to an end, but let’s have the mural show only the memorial to the Bomb, just that innocuous obelisk; oh, and also throw in a fucking road sign, so that our mural of the Bomb is so far removed from the idea of the Bomb and its destructive power that almost all of the people who walk into our family-friendly, community-centered, happiness- and nostalgia-obsessed eatery will not have any idea that they are enjoying their Quesadilla Burgers or Grilled Chicken Wonton Tacos while looming over them is a memorial to the thing that will likely bring the world as we know it to an end.
It doesn’t bother me none, says Barb. I never even really noticed it.
Barb talks about how back in the day her husband and two sons collected a million arrowheads and how she would still
to this day have them all except that her son married a woman who loved arrowheads too, but then it turned out she didn’t love him and loved money most of all. And so the million arrowheads have all been sold. Or most of them, anyway. She still has a box or two of the good ones in some old shed alongside her massive collection of movies on VHS. Barb tightens her bathrobe and switches from beer to a glass of wine that she implores be filled right to the brim. Her collection of VHS tapes is so massive, she used a computer to make a file that indexes all the movies she’s recorded from TV onto the VHS tapes over the years. She has the computer file printed out somewhere. She says there’s something like three thousand movies on the list but then remembers she could generally fit three movies on one VHS, so really it’s maybe only about a thousand videotapes. That still sounds to me like an impressive collection until she switches back over to the arrowhead story and says, Yeah, my husband and boy collected those arrowheads all over the Southwest. They got all kind of rocks too. You know, you’ll love this … they got some of that green stuff from the Bomb.
Trinitite, also called Alamogordo glass, is the name of the stuff created when the Gadget’s blast melted the desert sand. Everybody around here has some. My family has plenty and the bartender chimes in that she’s got some in her nightstand and Barb says her husband and her boy probably got one whole box full of it. I ask if her greedy ex-daughter-in-law absconded with the trinitite and she says no, she’s sure that’s still in the old shed. I tell her I hope she wasn’t too fond of her VHS collection. Even though trinitite is more or less safe to handle, a whole box of it probably has more than enough radiation to, over many decades in a storage shed, erase the VHS tapes sitting next to it. I’ve seen it erase X-ray film stored beneath it on a closet shelf. In 1945, radiation from the Gadget made it all the way to Indiana, where it ruined whole production runs of film at Kodak’s manufacturing plant. Likely all Barb’s recordings of The Conqueror have been erased by trinitite. She stops talking to me after this revelation. I keep picking at my Wonton Tacos.
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