The less famous Nuclear Weapons Center: an ironic metaphor with bits of green Trinitite too
Promisingly, as one approaches the White Sands Missile Range, the distinctive radiation hazard signs appear, decorating the barbed wire fence that glitters in the hot desert sun, as its steel links catch the reflections.
At the gates, soldiers in “camis” hand out instructions, brochures and search cars for terrorists. An odd combination of tasks, perhaps, but then White Sands is not only one of the most elaborate, sophisticated army bases in the world, but it's also open to the public. Albeit only two mornings a year, the first Saturday of April and October. So what is there on show?
Here, tucked away discreetly in several thousand miles of desert, with only yucca flowers and prickly pears for company, almost everything in the US military's unsurpassed arsenal of mass destruction has been tested. Here the famous Stealth Fighter, such as Serb militants shot down unexpectedly in the former Yugoslavia, and the “Patriot missiles” that failed to destroy Saddam's flying bombs over Israel, were refined and polished. The new “Star Wars” weapons that will save Americans from any rogue nuclear missiles are now being finalized here.
The Missile range is in an area of the desert poetically known as “Jornada del Muerte,” which translates, if you will, as “journey to death,” although the US Army prefers to re-christen the place simply, “White Sands.” Actually, the sand around it is a rather de-pressing grey, but anyway, the site suited them because it was extremely close to Los Alamos National Laboratories, where their atomic bomb was just being finished.
It was here, at what is now known as Trinity Site's Ground Zero on July 16, 1945 that the world saw its first atomic weapon explode, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed just weeks later. Today, a small obelisk made of shiny black crazy paving is one of America's “Creepiest National Historic Landmarks,” as one visitor, Carrie Fountain, put it. Young Carrie grew up in Las Cruces, sometimes nicknamed Bomb Town, not twenty miles from White Sands. Her family had friends and relatives who worked there. She used to be particularly proud of the strange fenced-off circle of sand at Trinity Site. She remembers how poetry readings and prayer service in anti-war commemorative spirit used to be held there.
It has always seemed fitting that the missile range should encourage such activity, that the circle of scarred earth should serve as a monument to free speech. Indeed, one might argue that the atomic bomb was employed to protect these freedoms. The Trinity Site opening should be a day of contemplation, of mourning, and, most importantly, a day when the site is open to the entire public, including poets and protesters.
But times change. Now Rule number 2 on the list handed out by the soldiers is: “Demonstrations, picketing, sit-ins, protest marches, political speeches and similar activities are prohibited.”
Nowadays, in place of peaceniks, soldiers direct streams of tourist cars to a huge paved parking area complete with hot-dog stands, port-a-potties and booths selling T-shirts and baseball caps. Cheaply printed on these is a picture of a mushroom cloud exploding, and the words: “Trinity Site: Home of the First Atomic Bomb.”
While Carrie was there, a Boy Scout Troop was too. When she asked the troop leader why they had come, he shrugged, and then explained simply, “Boy Scouts like things that blow up.”
And right at the center of Ground Zero now sits just what every Boy Scout expects to see: a replica of the Fat Man bomb—the bomb dropped on Hiroshima—alone on a flat-bed trailer. The day Carrie visited, as a joke, someone had written the words “EXPLODE ME” in the desert dust on the tail.
All that really remains of the original test site is a bit of one of the feet of the melted tower, once one hundred feet high (30 meters), and a small portion of earth, specially protected and preserved. It is a green and glassy mineral called Trinitite, and is what the desert sand nearest the bomb became after it exploded.
Although most of the Trinitite was cleared from the area in the 1970s, small chunks can still be found, false emeralds glinting in the grey dirt. And Carrie concludes that the best efforts of the US Army have been in vain.
...When I was a little girl, my grandmother often told me about the explosion, which she witnessed from more than 150 miles away. “I could see the neighbor's house,” she said of the moment the pre-dawn sky was lit up, spilling an eerie, greenish light into the front yard. It was silent, no sound, only light. A few minutes later, the sun—the actual sun—rose. In the days that followed, news agencies reported that an ammunitions dump had accidentally exploded. But many years later my grandmother would confide that all along she knew it was something else, something bigger, something awful. So did most everyone in New Mexico. And they were right... More than 300,000 lives were taken by the bomb tested in our backyard.
So she concludes for us, in the best style of the naive student she was (at least prior to the visit), that
Trinity Site remains an ironic metaphor: one that is particularly American with its confused and conflicting realities; a spot in the middle of nowhere where the entire world changed forever. Its scarred earth should be considered sacred ground—or cursed ground, whatever best speaks to the magnitude of its meaning. Perhaps, most fittingly, America's first Ground Zero should be a place where the public is free to praise or protest, sing or be silent, pray or spit. That's not the place I saw last April. I saw a place that was losing its meaning and turning into just another tourist attraction.
Which is why it belongs in this book.
At least according to Carrie, the design, manufacture and testing of America's nuclear weapons here has left countless many with radiation-related illnesses, including but not limited to: “beryllium poisoning, plutonium poisoning, leukemia, and multiple-myeloma, as well as cancers of the breast, bladder, colon, liver, lung, esophagus, stomach, thyroid and skin...” (That's enough, thanks, Carrie.) “No more protests, just hot dogs and souvenirs. Entry rules and RVs. One road In, one road out!” THAT'S ENOUGH, thanks, Carrie!