As much as this year’s 70th anniversary of stopping the Holocaust was a moment to honor, the anniversaries over the next few weeks will mark the successful test of Trinity and America’s horrific atomic destructions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, recalls Gary G. Kohls.
By Gary G. Kohls
Seventy years ago, on July 16, 1945, an assortment of scientists, including refugees who had fled European fascism, succeeded in exploding the first experimental atomic bomb in the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The site of the detonation of this plutonium bomb was to become blasphemously known as the Trinity Site after Trinity, the code name for the experiment. Trinity was the final stage of the U.S. Army’s top secret Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs with the intent to use them against military targets in Nazi Germany. That is, until Germany surrendered before any of the bombs were ready to launch.
Trinity test on July 16, 1945. (U.S. government photo)
Then mission creep entered the picture and a scramble for other targets ensued. Despite the certainty that Japan was trying to find a way to surrender with honor, the U.S. military started looking for Japanese targets. The Trinity test bomb was essentially identical to the one that would destroy Nagasaki a few weeks later on Aug. 9.
Motivating factors for not just mothballing the massively expensive project included 1) the huge secret costs that would be difficult to explain to Congress if the bomb hadn’t been used, 2) the momentum that had been built up was impossible to stop, 3) the unquenchable desire to achieve retribution against Japan for its ambush at Pearl Harbor (killing 2,500 soldiers), and 4) the need to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that the United States had “the bomb” and to warn Stalin to stay away from the spoils of the already defeated Japan.
The ragtag team of mostly English-as-a-second-language immigrant scientists had been ably headed by two American citizens, the physicist Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer (the first director of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, which was code-named Project Y) and by U.S. Army Colonel (soon to be promoted to brigadier general) Leslie R. Groves. Each had been…