ALAMOGORDO, New Mexico (dpa) – The noonday sun is burning down hotly on the deserts of White Sands. Off in the distance of the barren flatlands there is a chain of mountains, shimmering light- blue.
Gusts of wind from the south are whipping up white dust. On this foresaken spot in the midst of an off-limits military area there stands a small monument in stone. It marks the spot where history was written more than half a century ago.Ground Zero.On July 16, 1945, at 5:29.45 a.m. the first atomic bomb was detonated here. The testing area in the south of the U.S. state of New Mexico was called the “Trinity Site”, and the stone marker still shows an increased level of radioactivity.The military term “ground zero” stands for the centre of a nuclear explosion. Since the terror attacks on the World Trade Center last September 11, the term has come back to describe the WTC site as wll.Trinity Site in the desert of New Mexico remains off-limits to the public, except for the first Saturday in April when for one day it is opened up. A convoy of around 150 cars and trucks makes its way to the site from the nearby town of Alamogordo.On average, about 2,000 people come to visit. Many are teachers or historians, but most are those who are simply curious. The vehicles park outside the a fence, along which there are stands selling hot dogs and T-shirts.Visitors reach the historic site itself by foot. Entire families, some pushing baby buggies, others with a grandmother in a wheelchair, and some with their dogs along, make their way to Ground Zero. Cameras are pulled out to take snapshots of the occasion.Atop a flat-bed truck there is a replica of the first atomic bomb nicknamed “Fat Man”. There are display boxes showing a green, shiny substance – the desert sand which was melted in the heat of the nuclear blast.A shuttle bus takes visitors to McDonald Ranch. In the main building there, the trigger device and other components of The Bomb are on display.After that early-morning test in July 1945, the scientists gave the military the green light for the terrifying new weapon. Two bombs were in fact already on their way towards the Pacific region, where the war with Japan was still raging.The first bomb destroyed Hiroshima on August 6. The second struck Nagasaki on August 9. A few days later, Japan capitulated.White Sands Missile Range, located between two mighty mountain ranges, is the largest restricted military area in the United States, about 160 kilometres long and 60 kilometres wide. Almost devoid of humans but with nearly always clear skies, it is ideal for rocket tests. To the south of it is Holloman Air Force Base.It is also here that the natural phenomenon is to be found which gives the area its name: the blinding white sand dunes of White Sands. This is the largest gypsum-sand desert in the world.Development of the nuclear bomb went by the code name “Manhattan Project”, and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the effort which began in 1942.Describing his reaction after the test in White Sands, Oppenheimer said when scientists emerged from the bunker “we knew that the world was no longer the same” and the mood was sombre:“A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from the ‘Bhagavad-Gita’ in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty: ‘I am become death: the destroyer of worlds’.”
