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July
16, 1945 saw three dawns.
At 5:29.45 a.m. Mountain War Time, scientists
detonated the world’s first atomic bomb 171 miles north of El
Paso at a site on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico.
That was the first dawn, followed by the natural rising of the sun. The third
dawn was metaphorical, the beginning of the Atomic Age.
The nuclear explosion
sent a blinding flash of light into the sky, turning the pre-dawn into high noon.
A ball of energy 10,000 times hotter than the sun rose more than 38,000 feet into
the atmosphere. Scientists later calculated the blast to be equal to 20,000 tons
of TNT.
In El Paso, school teacher A.O. Wynn was up early. When he saw
the burst of light, he dismissed it as a distant forest fire, albeit a big one.
A trainman at the El Paso rail yard correctly assumed the light to have been caused
by an explosion of some sort. But neither of these Texans, nor the many others
who either saw the brilliant flash or heard what sounded like thunder on a perfectly
clear morning, would know the real story for nearly another two months.
The
military issued a news release dismissing the incident as the explosion of a munitions
warehouse and, it being wartime, no one challenged that explanation.
Though
the military deemed disinformation in the name of national security an acceptable
reason to lie to the public about what had happened, for posterity’s sake, Brig.
Gen. T.F. Farrell described what really happened:
“The effects could well
be called…magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon
of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared
description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity
many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue.
It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a
clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.”
The story of the Manhattan Project and its product, the atomic bombs
against Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945, has been well told. But buried in all the
official documents is another story, far less known.
As
work proceeded on the development of the bomb, the military considered eight possible
locations for the first test. Four sites were in New Mexico, in the same state
as the project headquarters at Los Alamos. California had two of the sites and
one was in Colorado. Finally, one site lay in Texas: Padre Island.
On some
levels, using Padre Island as a secret test site made sense. Nearby Corpus Christi
offered rail service and had a deep water port. Too, it had a busy Naval Air Station.
And Padre Island, extending for some 120 miles nearly all the way to Mexico and
already being used as a bombing range, amounted to one of the most remote locations
in the nation.
Earlier in the war, in fact, the island was off-limits
to civilians. U.S. Coast Guard patrolled the island’s lonely beaches by horseback
and in jeeps. Their two-fold mission was to look for any survivors washed ashore
from oil tankers torpedoed by German U-boats and to guard against any landing
by Nazi saboteurs.
As the war progressed, the military cleared the Gulf
of Mexico of enemy submarines. The Allies eventually gained the momentum, but
both the U.S. and Germany were working to develop terrible new weapons, including
a bomb like no other.
Fortunately for the sake of democracy, the U.S.
made the best progress, building three bombs. The first would be a test device.
The Army finally decided to test the bomb on an existing military range
north of Blythe, CA. Coming in as second choice was the Alamogordo site in the
aptly named Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) Valley north of El Paso.
Maj.
Gen. Leslie Groves, heading the military aspect of the operation, opted not to
use the California range because he didn’t want to have to deal with the base’s
cantankerous commander, Gen. George S. Patton.
Following the test in New
Mexico, the government kept the Trinity site closed to the public for decades.
Even now, it can only be visited twice a year.
The successful testing
of the world’s first atomic bomb changed history. Much farther down the significance
scale, the explosion eventually gave New Mexico another tourist attraction.
Had the explosion occurred on Padre Island, turning some of its white sand into
glass, Texas would have had the future tourist destination. But given the highly
controlled access that would have followed the explosion, it might have prevented
the island’s eventual transformation into a 130,454-acre Padre Island National
Seashore – the longest undeveloped barrier island in the world.
Clearly,
not making the cut is not always a bad thing. | |
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