Our Nest on Wheels

July 16, 1945. This is a date that everyone should know, because it marks the dawn of a new era in human history. This is the date of the detonation of the first nuclear device, which ushered in the nuclear age. Man had learned how to harness the power of the atom, and it would be used either for good, like unlimited energy or medical imaging, or evil, like destroying the entire planet. Or a bit of both. Scientists at Los Alamos had been working on the Manhattan project in secrecy trying to determine how to create a bomb that would use nuclear fission. There were huge technical challenges, and they were in a race with Germany. It was believed that whoever solved the problem first, would win the war. World War II.

I won't retell the history of the Manhattan project. You can read more about it here, if you like. The scientists were working on two different bomb types, a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb. It had been determined that you could trigger a nuclear reaction with enriched uranium by using explosives to force one mass of uranium into another, like a bullet going down the barrel of a gun into a target.  This was the design of the "Little Boy" bomb that was exploded over Hiroshima. They were so confident in it that it was not even tested prior to use. 

Part of the problem was that it was extremely difficult to get significant amounts of enriched uranium, so there was very little material available for testing. For this reason, they were also working on a plutonium bomb. But research had determined that the method of triggering nuclear fission in uranium would not work for plutonium, and a new method needed to be found. The design for the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, the one dropped on Nagasaki, required a sphere of plutonium surrounded by explosives that would force it to compress on itself in an implosion that would trigger the nuclear reaction. This required incredibly precise timing and had never been done before. They were not sure if it would work, so they tested in the New Mexico desert.

The Trinity Site is where that test was conducted. Miles away from any towns, in what is now a vast missile test range, it was the ideal location. The White Sands Missile Range is an active site for our nation's military to conduct missile tests, so it is closed to the public except for two days a year, when you can visit the Trinity Site, the ground zero of the nuclear age. The days are the first Saturday in April and in October. We happened to be staying in Ruidoso, NM, not too far away in early October, so I decided to go.

I knew in advance that there would not be a lot to see. A nuclear explosion tends to obliterate everything nearby, and of course 72 years have passed. But the semi-annual public access to the site is wildly popular, and people come from all over for this and begin lining up hours before opening. I arrived mid-morning, after driving across miles and miles of uninhabited desert. From the entrance of the missile range, it's still another 22 miles to the actual site. At ground zero there is an obelisk marking the spot directly below where the bomb was detonated. The tower that held the bomb 100 feet high was vaporized and only a small part of one leg remains visible in a lump of molten concrete.

The fireball, estimated to be one million degrees hot, vaporized tons of desert sand. As it cooled, the vaporized sand turned to liquid, and the sky rained boiling sand. Further cooling turned the sand back to solid, yielding a new mineral called Trinitite. While the site had been covered in this green glassy like substance, they have since removed it all so that visitors don't try to run off with it. They had samples on site for us to see and handle. It's still radioactive, although after 72 years it's a pretty low level. They do say that after you visit the site 10 times you get a free chest X-ray.

After visiting ground zero, I boarded a bus to see the small farmhouse where the bomb was assembled. I was struck by the ordinariness of it all. You kind of expect to see something a little more high-tech, but in 1945, this kind of science was pretty crude. They did seal the windows of the bomb-assembly room with plastic to keep the dust out.

the assembly room

No, this post is not a commentary on Wheaton/Winfield, where we used to live. It's about our visit to White Sands National Monument.

In a previous post, I (Steve) wrote about the gorgeous white sand beaches of the Florida panhandle. Of all the places we visited in Florida this past winter, the panhandle beaches are our favorites. We think that they are likely the nicest beaches in the world, and others have confirmed that view, not that we've visited all the beaches in the world, but we can work on that.

On an earlier family vacation, we visited Great Sand Dunes National Park (I think at the time we were there it was a National Monument), and we were amazed at how you can get such a huge pile of beach sand in the middle of the Colorado mountains. Well, if you combine the white sands of the Florida beaches with the the idea of a huge area of sand dunes in the mountains you get White Sands National Monument. This is the world's largest gypsum dunefield. But rather than call it gypsum, it's easier to think of it as baby powder, because that's what it looks like a feels like when you walk in it. Amazingly (at least amazing to a couple of kids who grew up burning the bottoms of their feet on Lake Michigan beaches), this sand doesn't get hot!

It's hard to get good pictures of the sand dunes and their vastness. Because they are such a brilliant white, all the contrast that shows shapes gets lost. There is a surprising amount of wildlife that lives in the dunes, some of it specifically adapted to blend in, like this lizard:

Human wildlife can stay in the dunes too. You can get a permit to camp in the dunes.  It didn't really hold any appeal for us, as you're not really very far from the road, and you don't really get to see anything different. But during a full moon I would guess that even in the middle of the night it's about as light as daytime with all the white sand reflecting the moonlight.

We went to White Sands from Las Cruces as we were staying in Las Cruces and it's only about 50 miles away. We did not realize that there is a border control checkpoint just a few miles before you get to White Sands. Jane was not carrying her driver's license, and neither of us had our passports, so without proper identification, we ran the risk of being searched and detained. (As an aside, I've discovered that almost all of our travels in 2016 and 2017 have been in the 100-mile-wide "no man's land" along our country's border, where your constitutional protections from arbitrary search and seizure do not apply. I wasn't really aware of this until recently, but you can read more here if you're interested.) But apparently we look white enough not to be stopped, while the Hispanic-looking man ahead of us was asked to pull to the side for a search. 

A more likely thing to disrupt your travel to White Sands is missile testing. The road ffrom Las Cruces runs through the White Sands Missile Range, home to a US Army and Air Force base and the site of many significant tests, including the Trinity nuclear test site (1944), Nike missile test launches, Partriot missile tests, and the V2 launching site. After World War II, we brought all the German V2 rockets we could find to New Mexico for study. I think we also brought most of the captured German scientists who developed them. Rather than send these guys to prison for their role in developing the weapons that rained down on London, we sent them to the New Mexico desert. Pretty much even, I think.

I got to visit the missile museum while Jane did not as she had forgotten her ID at home, and did not look enough like a German scientist.

. . . and some seem to be rather crude. But they're all part of American history.