LOS ALAMOS (dpa) – On July 16, 1945, a red mushroom cloud rose into the sky over the New Mexico desert, closely followed by a shock wave and a droning sound.
The world’s first atomic bomb was fired on White Sands testing ground in the southwest of the United States at exactly 05.29 hours and 45 seconds, after years of intensive and secret preparation.Today visitors to New Mexico can find out all about that secretive time, particularly in Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos and the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, the largest city in the state.The nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia began in Los Alamos, a small town in the north of New Mexico on the Pajarito plateau.In a smart wooden house called Fuller Lodge in the town centre, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi and other scientists invented the atomic bomb. The building had been a boy’s private school before the scientists moved in.Today the nuclear laboratories on the plateau are situated behind Oppenheimer Bridge. They remain secret, because America is still modernizing its nuclear weapons.If you cross the bridge, you come to a car park in front of the entrance area. That is a far as you will get, without authorization. The Atomic Bomb Research Centre is an Institute of the University of California, and is controlled by the U.S. Energy Department.It is merely legend that Los Alamos is still a forbidden ghost town. It has been open to visitors since the mid-1950s. But an old watchtower at the entrance to the town bears witness to the fact that it was once the most secret city in the western world.If you want to find out how an atomic bomb works, then the Bradbury Science Museum is the place to go. It offers a comprehensive explanation of basic facts of radioactivity in general, and nuclear bombs in particular.It also jokingly offers instructions on how to make an A-bomb. In theory, all a potential terrorist needs is a handful of fissile material, a few pounds of gunpowder and a thick water pipe, it says.Just under two hours away by car south of Los Alamos is the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, the only museum in the world that exhibits nuclear bombs. It is situated at the Kirtland Air Force Base.It was here that the Enola Gay took off in August 1945, the plane that carried the “Little Boy” atomic bomb which devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima.Today the Enola Gay is exhibited in the museum. The plane’s bomb shaft is open and as you gaze through it you can ponder on whether this bomb, by ending World War II, saved more lives than it destroyed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Many Americans are convinced that it saved more lives. This is the only way to understand the pride with which the U.S. exhibits its atomic arsenal. For non-Americans the museum is above all an interesting exhibition of technology.It shows models of the “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” atomic bombs. “Little Boy” is long and slim and blue, and when it was fired on Hiroshima it was full of uranium. “Fat Man” is egg-shaped and carried plutonium when it triggered an apocalypse over Nagasaki. They are the only two nuclear bombs ever to have been used in war.The museum continues in the same style. The smallest, the largest, the one fired with a parachute, the one with a grenade – nearly every nuclear weapon the U.S. military has ever made is displayed here.The bomb cases are genuine, although the uranium, plutonium and the explosive materials have been removed. Alongside them, plaques and texts explain the history of the atomic bomb from Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler to the START Treaty, which reduced the number of bombs produced in the West and East.The museum courtyard displays all kinds of missiles and aeroplanes. But the real magnet for visitors is the Boeing Stratofortress, better known as the B52-bomber.This giant plane could reach any part of the Earth at a height that ground-based air defences could not reach. It could even be loaded with “Mike 17″s – at the time the most powerful nuclear bomb built by the Americans, a so-called thermonuclear bomb, which needed an ordinary atomic bomb to detonate it.The 20-ton bomb, packed in a steel pipe nearly two metres in diameter, was thankfully never used.
