Not much to see but history

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M. -

The road to Trinity Site is a good place to log some thinking about a profound human moment.

The only distractions for miles are red Southwest dirt, scrubby trees and grasses. The timeless landscape is bound on all sides by blue waves of distant mountains. Amid this isolation came the breakthrough that helped end World War II in the Pacific: the explosion of the first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945. The test proved that the energy of a split atom could be harnessed for weapons.

Trinity Site is now part of the military base called White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), a sophisticated testing ground for military and commercial interests. The base runs two open houses, which are free but restricted to two dates a year, the first Saturdays in October and April.

A sharp breeze announced autumn at 4,900 feet on Oct. 3 as I headed toward the Hwy. 380 turnoff to WSMR's Stallion Range Center, 12 miles east of San Antonio, N.M. The gate had opened at 8 a.m., and by 8:20, vehicles were backed up as members of the WSMR staff questioned each driver.

Do you have weapons or alcoholic beverages? Both are forbidden. Does everyone have picture IDs to show the guards? That's mandatory at any U.S. military base.

Trinity is not on the way to anywhere, but 3,300 people showed up. Many arrived as I did, through the north gate, unescorted, in a private vehicle. The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, a Smithsonian affiliate in Albuquerque, provided the only docent-guided tour this year. Sun Tours of Albuquerque sent two buses on an overnight trip that included White Sands National Monument near Alamogordo, N.M. The Socorro (N.M.) Heritage and Visitor Center offered a van ride for $2. Some cars arrived through the base's east gate in a caravan escorted from the Alamogordo area by Department of Defense police.

A full house

The parking lot was filling by 9 a.m. With no ceremonies or programs scheduled, picture-taking was the most popular activity at the Ground Zero obelisk of rough, black lava rocks from nearby volcanic remains.

The lack of cell-phone conversations was refreshing -- very little coverage out there. Without the temptation to babble to faraway pals, people were connecting face to face, like the group that converged around folks carrying Geiger counters.

Richard Plant, a chemist from Little Rock, Ark., was certain that trinitite was in that dirt. He had tested his gizmo back in Socorro, where it registered radiation at about one click per minute. At Trinity, depending on where it pointed, it registered up to 400 clicks per minute.

Radioactive trinitite, sand that melted in the blast, looks like dirty green glass. It's forbidden to remove the lumpy artifact from Trinity, a national historic landmark, although plenty was taken in the years before fences enclosed the site, said Jim Eckles, a volunteer who retired from WSMR public relations.

The bomb crater was excavated in the early 1950s to remove anything radioactive, but bits of trinitite remain, which is why no pets are allowed in the enclosure. Pets dig.

WSMR urges some visitor caution about radiation for small children and pregnant women. But one hour at Ground Zero results in about the same exposure as watching television for a year, a handout says.

Motorized mobility chairs and wheelchairs pushed by helpers had little trouble navigating the broad gravel path to Ground Zero, but the terrain inside the 400-foot-diameter enclosure was tricky. Over and over I tripped on hillocks of grass, jolting my bad joints. I got as far as the flatbed truck holding the replica casing of the bomb called Fat Man. I decided against trekking to the distant fence to study the vintage photographs hanging there, or to the bunker that protects part of the original crater.

Decide for yourself

Months before the test, a deep undercurrent had arisen that it wasn't moral to create or use such a weapon.

As the test drew near, President Harry Truman was at the Potsdam Conference, preparing to stare down Russia's Joseph Stalin as the Allies shaped postwar Germany and debated an ultimatum to Japan. Trinity's success, though kept an American secret, handed Truman a potent diplomatic weapon. "I hope for some sort of peace," he wrote on the night of July 16 in his journal, "but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up, perhaps there'll be no reason for any of it."

A few weeks after the test, the combined death toll from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, difficult to determine, was about 220,000.

Nothing at Trinity Site takes a stance on the morality issue, and political demonstrations are forbidden.

Judith Mead, a docent with Albuquerque's nuclear museum, said that her late husband didn't doubt the need for the bomb. When Japan surrendered, the Navy officer was on Okinawa, preparing for the invasion of the home islands, an event predicted to kill millions of people.

"He felt that the work done here saved his life," Mead said. "People have to make up their own minds how they feel about it."

The assembly house

After lunch I rode a shuttle bus to the McDonald ranch house -- no private vehicles allowed -- where the plutonium bomb core was assembled on test day. The four-room house with lean-tos had been "unbuilt" in the 1980s to its 1945 appearance, with added handicapped access. The interior was bare except for some photos and documents related to the restoration.

About 1:30 p.m., I joined a steady stream of cars heading out the north gate, which would close at 2.

There's not much to see at Trinity Site, yet I had lingered almost five hours, immersed in a landscape of history so vast that it changed humankind forever.

Trudi Hahn Pickett retired from the Star Tribune in 2005. She lives in Las Cruces, N.M.