The Leering Sphere or The Bomb in New Mexico

Today July 16, 2018, is the 73rd anniversary of the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site in New Mexico.

Santa Fe Opera interpretation of The Gadget -- "Dr. Atomic" 2018 Season

This titanium sphere -- or was it stainless steel? -- hung menacingly over the entire production of Peter Sellars' and John Adams's "Dr. Atomic" which opened at Santa Fe Opera last night [July 14], shortly before the 73rd anniversary of the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site in New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range (then the  Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range.)

The Gadget as it was called, memories of The Gadget, the enormity of what was created at Los Alamos -- a bare 25 miles from the semi-outdoor Opera House ("the audience can see Los Alamos from their seats" quoth librettist and director Peter Sellars in one of the talks we heard before the performance), and the aftermath of the atomic bomb test at Trinity Site, July 16, 1945, some 200 miles south of Los Alamos resonate profoundly in New Mexico, in some ways more profoundly than anywhere else in the world except Japan.

There were far more US nuclear tests outside Las Vegas, NV, and in the Pacific than in New Mexico (just one -- the first one --that we know of in our backyard) but ultimately the atmospheric tests elsewhere became a kind of twisted Cold War entertainment - "whoa, wouldja lookit that!" -- that was sometimes shown to school kids before their Duck and Cover exercises to scare the  shit out of them (how well I remember.)

"Dr. Atomic" deals with the tragic story of Dr. J, Robert Oppenheimer ("Oppie") at Los Alamos and Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the hours leading up to the first atomic bomb test and its echoes through time to today. 

It's a complex story that doesn't exist in linear time, and apparently the complexity and non-linearity as well as the often jarring contemporary musical score can be off-putting to some opera-goers though it wasn't apparent opening night. It was a full house. The audience's attention was as intense as the music and performances. The response was enthusiastic.

I overheard one rather fancy looking woman talking during intermission: "My friend told me I wouldn't like it. Well, I rather think I do," she said. Indeed.

I can't say I "liked" it, no. But I will say I was quite taken with it and had no problem staying for its 3 hours and 20 minute length (with intermission) and the interminable after performance getting-out-of the-parking-lot minuet. (I said to one of the parking boys, "At this rate, we'll be here all night." He grinned and said, "That's only because my co-workers are incompetent. Have a safe trip home!!" Chuckle,)

We got home at 2:45 am tired but moved.

We've been semi-immersed in the story of nuclear weapons and the struggle against them in New Mexico for as long as we've been here, for almost as long as we've been coming here (more than 35 years now). I've written several pieces about it, about visiting Trinity site, about going to Los Alamos, about duck and cover, and so on and so forth. No one of my generation escaped fear of the looming mushroom cloud. It was the defining image of the post WWII era, one that seems to have been largely forgotten now or set aside by the younger generations. Thoughts of nuclear annihilation, instant incineration, barely reach consciousness except under the most extraordinary circumstances these days. And then the images seem to be off the mark.

Hardly anyone seems to understand what a nuclear weapon is or does anymore. And maybe that's a good thing.

Peter Sellars said he tried to maintain the classical tragic unities of time and place, and he tried to tell the story of the tragedy of what happened not just to Oppenheimer but for many of those who worked on developing The Bomb and of course for the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who died as a result of its use.

It's pointed out during the opera that many more Japanese civilians died during the firebombings of Tokyo and Yokahama that preceded the use of nuclear weapons on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To say, then, an atom bomb is a unique horror is something of a stretch, no? No, it's not a stretch at all when one bomb can cause in an instant more destruction than thousands dropped over a period of hours or days.

The scientists at Los Alamos agonized over the use of nuclear weapons, and hundreds tried to convince Washington authorities not to use the creation of their laboratories on populations -- ever, if possible. Of course, then and now, there was a contrary faction who dearly wanted to use nuclear weapons, not just for effect, either.

Particularly torn by his creation was J. Robert Oppenheimer himself. A point is made that he is driven mad by what he has created. He never fully recovers, and in a sense, his creation kills him -- as well as many, many more.

Sellars reconceived the production for Santa Fe. For one thing, the production takes place within sight of Los Alamos (if you look hard!), and within hailing distance of Trinity. Those of us who live here and have paid attention know these places and these stories rather well. Earlier productions (we have a DVD of one, I believe it was in Amsterdam) focused more on the story telling than on its meaning, and they were visualized much more completely. The DVD production uses a close replica of The Gadget that is brought out at a particular time to be hoisted onto the tower, whereas in Santa Fe the Sphere that represents The Gadget and much else is never not there; its presence looming -- and leering -- throughout.

Sellars said the shiny Sphere was meant to reflect the audience, but it doesn't really do that (at least not from where we were sitting in cheap seats toward the back of the orchestra section.) What it reflected instead were the lights on stage which had the effect of creating many different facial expressions, from evil and bloodthirsty to almost benign. It was remarkable and mesmerizing. The picture above was taken by your correspondent some time before the beginning of the performance, and it is one of the many instances when the "eyes" of the Sphere gazed impassively on the scene before it.

In this production, too, Sellars made a conscious and mostly successful effort to include Native Americans on stage and integrated into the story in somewhat the same way they were part of the story of the creation of the Bomb. This is Indian Country, the events happened in Indian Country, and the effects are still felt throughout Indian Country -- particularly on the uranium miners in Navajoland and at Laguna Pueblo. That deadly effect is not dealt with directly in the opera. Sellars was asked by a Diné gentleman at one of the talks whether he'd included the miners, and he wouldn't answer directly. He said something about the "effects on everyone then and now" are included, but that isn't what he was asked. In fact, there is no mention of miners at all. There is only passing mention of Downwinders -- people who were unwittingly affected by the fallout from the Trinity test,. But at least they are there -- actual Downwinders on stage -- along with dancers from the Tesuque, Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Pueblos. They performed a ceremonial corn dance prior to the performance of the opera -- as a healing gesture -- and then returned in the second act as a Presence, representing the Original Peoples upon whom and among whom but not by whom this monstrosity of war was created and perpetrated.

The presence of the Indians helped to ground the production but I felt they were not integrated into it the way  they might have been -- and that that was probably their choice. It's not their story, and they're not telling. They could and one day probably will tell their own story, though, and it will be quite different.

As we were making our way to the parking lot before the performance, there were sheriffs deputies along the road, signs saying "Ticket holders only beyond this point" and at the entrance to the parking lot a young man asked to see our tickets. He said there were protests expected, and they had to check. Hm. As we were making our way from the parking lot to the Opera House, a young man in the high priced parking area near the venue asked that we take some literature  from the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition protesting the production and the proposed increase in nuclear weapons development in New Mexico. This was intended, said the literature, to make New Mexico the sole production site for "plutonium pits" -- something I'd never heard of -- that were the essential cores of nuclear bombs.

They were protesting the production because they saw it as a celebration of nuclear weapons and war.

Uh. No. It's not. Far from it. That's the thing about tragedy. It doesn't celebrate.





"We Had No Money."

Another excerpt from the Scroll version of "On the Road:"

Neal hadn’t mentioned money. “Where are we going to stay?” We wandered around carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow streets. Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet, disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome decadent Casanovish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops, a lemon lot and how’s a man going to make a living with a gang like that. Nevertheless Louanne had been around these people -- this is O’Farrell and Powell and thereabouts -- and a grayfaced hotel clerk let us have a room on credit. That was the first step. Then we had to eat, and didn’t do so till midnight when we found a niteclub singer in her hotel room who turned an iron upside down on a coathanger in the wastebasket and warmed up a can of pork & beans. I looked out the window at the winking neons; and said to myself “Where is Neal and why isn’t he concerned about our welfare?” I lost faith in him that year. It was our last meet, no more. I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time of my life. Louanne and I walked around for miles looking for food-money, we even visited some drunken seamen in a flophouse on Mission street that she knew; they offered us whiskey. In the hotel we lived together two days. I realized that now Neal was out of sight Louanne had no real interest in me; she was trying to reach Neal through me, his buddy. We had arguments in the hotel room. We also spent entire nights in bed and I told her my dreams. I told her about the big snake of the world that was coiled in the earth like a worm in an apple and would someday nudge up a hill to be thereafter known as Snake Hill and fold out upon the plain, fifty miles long and devouring as it went along. I told her this snake was Satan.

This was Kerouac's version of San Francisco (aka "'Frisco" -- obviously not from around there) in 1949 or 50 when he managed to write this part of the Scroll after returning to the World or New York, Queens where his mother lived.

Oh, I know those streets very well, O'Farrell and Powell, Larkin, Hyde and Geary, and down into the Mission and wherever you might want to go on Market Street; Columbus and Broadway and Mason and Grant, too.

I lived in San Francisco for a while, not long, a year or so, but I found that I reacted poorly to the urban-ness of it, the tight-packing of people, the poverty of so many, the jangling noises of the streets, the hubbub of it all. So as soon as it was feasible, I was gone, with a pretty loud "whew!" and commenced traveling all over the country, never staying anywhere for more than a few months at a time until much later in my life.

San Francisco, though, was in my blood, and even if I didn't want to live there again, it became a routine destination stop, a day trip, a Place to go. Our friends who lived there would very rarely venture out of it, and as was the case with Angeleños down the Coast, or Manhattanites back East, they were fiercely and proudly ignorant of anything outside their tight and right little peninsula or plain or island. Beyond the borders of their ken, there was no there there, as Gertrude Stein so apocryphally but truly wrote about Oakland across the Bay. It simply wasn't a Place. Not to a San Franciscan, not to someone who hardly ever traveled beyond the Ferry Building and may never have even been there, at least not before the Earthquake and the destruction of the Embarcadero Freeway which cut off the iconic survivor of the 1906 Earthquake from the City.

When Kerouac arrived in San Francisco the second time, with Neal Cassady and Neal's wife Louanne, he was -- according to his account in "On the Road," which should be taken with a grain of salt -- confronted with the starkness of the City, and it is a stark place to be when you have... nothing or at least no money. It was even then, in 1949 or 50, an expensive place to be, merely because it was a city, and for constantly broke people like Kerouac and Cassady, it was even tougher. The area where they wound up, the Tenderloin, was then as now filled with bums and hobos and con-artists and police, with sharks and their prey.

In "The Dharma Bums" Kerouac writes about being homeless a lot, using that term "homeless" almost as we would use it today, though he doesn't mean "the homeless community to be served by NGOs" and such as is the case now. He wasn't actually homeless, in that he could and did return to his mother's place anytime he wanted, but he had no home of his own. In "The Dharma Bums" his homelessness, staying with others, is one of the points of the novel and the quest for enlightenment he is on. As a bhikku, he cannot have a home of his own in any case, only "resting places," mostly found through the kindness of friends and strangers.

So it is in his magnum opus, "On the Road," except there's no pretense of a Dharmic adventure. That is to say, Kerouac wasn't aware of it at that time. He and Neal and all the rest are on the road without money or with so little money they might as well have none, and they have their adventures on the down low in the multiple senses of the phrase cruising the underbelly of America picking up hitchhikers and stealing much of what they need at a time when that underbelly was largely ignored by most Americans, basking as Americans were in PostWar VictoryGlory, and setting out to settle down in spanking new suburbs with a DeSoto in the driveway and crisp frills on the daughter, rough denim on the boy playing in the dusty yard with the dog.

"On the Road" was written or drafted before widespread television acquisition, but what would come is prefigured. There were enough televisions by the late '40s and early '50s to start making a dent in the mindset of Americans, and by the time "On the Road" was published after several revisions in 1957, television was ubiquitous.

One of the unintended effects of television was that it kept people at home. They didn't go out as much; they didn't go anywhere as much as they used to, so a story like "On the Road," when it came out in 1957, was exotic and peculiar and worrisome and wonderful to people who had never even imagined much beyond what they saw on the idiot box and in their own yards and neighborhoods.

Those without homes, the bums and hobos and Dharmic wanderers as well as the con-men that preyed on them, and the Beats as Kerouac and his set came to be known, were hardly considered at all, but when they were, it was as images rather than as people. The Beats were made into A Thing. Commercial. Movies and publishing and underground coffee houses and bars. Poetry that puzzled and howled. Jazz. Bebop. Then the Thing became another Thing.

And "On the Road."

The images are now permanent psychic messages. The subjects of entire libraries of scholarly research. Pilgrimages by devotees and acolytes on quests to find the Dharmic Truth of Kerouac's life, or of Burroughs or Ginsberg or Cassady or whomever. The Beats became a Lifestyle and then there would be a paradigm shift when the Rucksack Revolution that Gary Snyder anticipated became a reality in the 60s, and nothing would be quite the same again.

Now that I'm old and have settled down somewhat, I look back on my years of traveling, my peripatetic wanderings on the road, back and forth, back and forth, here and there, vanishing, appearing, darting from place to place, with a kind of awe and wonder. I did that? Most people never do. I say I lived in Sacramento for 50 years or more, but thinking back, I realize I was on the road constantly, peripatetic wandering even when supposedly settled down. I wasn't settled down. Not at all.

We lived in this house in Sacramento for 20 some-odd years, longer than any place else in my whole life by far, and yet thinking back, I wasn't there all that much because I was traveling so often for work or for pleasure or just because, and one of my constant destinations -- at least after 1982 -- was New Mexico.

Kerouac noted on his own wanderings that New Mexico had been the site of the first atom bomb test. And he saw a vision as he passed by Alamogordo:

"This Is the Impossibility of the Existence of Anything"

Channeling Oppenheimer?

We've made it a point to go out to Trinity Site where Kerouac never was to pay our respects.  

But that's about as far as we get these days. An occasional day trip within New Mexico to some location with meaning or amusement, then back to rest up for the next one. We go to see the cranes out at the Bosque del Apache, even though they've been coming around to see us, roosting just down the street in the daytime. The Bosque and Socorro and Las Vegas and Trinity... not to forget Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

But not so much anymore.

Nuclear Panaceas

This is something of an expansion on yesterday's post, which was itself more of a placeholder than a fully thought out piece. There were literally so many things swirling in my mind yesterday, like the whirlwinds on the Jornada de los Muertos, the Journey of the Dead, the name the Spanish conquistadores gave to the plain on which the Trinity Test took place.

"Other-worldliness" was very much a factor in the adventure. Even getting to the Site -- especially the slower-than-slow progress through the Stallion Range Gate -- was part of the Other World sense of it all. Once inside the gate, we passed by the site where I remember seeing ruins of temporary classroom and other buildings, fabric walled, torn to shreds, with desks and chairs and chalkboards still in them when I was there before, but now they were gone, just the platforms and concrete pads on which they stood still visible.

That reminded me somehow of a place near where I once lived in California. It had been a transit camp for Japanese internees, one that was quite notorious in its day. It once consisted of row on row of drab and dreary barracks into which the Japs (as they were known) were crammed until transport was available to haul them to their final camp at Tule Lake or Manzanar or wherever.

Apparently after the War, there had been a big fire, and all the hutments and barracks and latrines and whatnot had burned to the ground. The site had been abandoned and had pretty much returned to the wild. If the military or anyone else owned it, there was no sign.

However, though the buildings were gone, the concrete pads on which they stood were still there when I was living nearby (I was then about 12 or 13). And the pads were littered with charred wood and broken and fused glass, a lot of which was green. There were no artifacts that I can recall, though there might have been some basins or door knobs or what have you lost in the weeds that surrounded the pads and had grown up through the cracked asphalt that had once been roadways between the buildings.

I didn't know what this place had been for some time after I first explored the ruins. Then my mother told me. She knew. She'd been stationed at the air base not far from this site during the War. She knew what it was and what it was for because it was right there when she was stationed at the base (she'd joined the Women's Army Air Corps) and everyone on base knew why it was there and what it was for. It was the transit camp for the Japs -- both when they were headed out to the distant concentration camps and when they were finally allowed to return to what was left of their homes in 1945. In between times, the military had occupied the buildings as additional base housing.

At that time, I could barely imagine what had happened during the War, though talk about it and movies about it, and reminiscence about World War II were ever-present during my childhood. We often think about the Depression as being the formative social and cultural factor of 20th Century America, but it was actually World War II -- the War which changed everything.

My mother had been friends with a Japanese American farm family before the War, and briefly, once they were rounded up for the concentration camps, she had taken care of their farm, hopeful that they would not be away for very long. But the farm was much more than she could handle, and when she heard that they would be gone "for the duration," she turned its care  over to an Anglo neighbor who was not particularly friendly with the family who was sent to Manzanar or Tule Lake or one of the other internment camps.

Soon thereafter, she joined the Women's Army Air Corps, she found herself stationed near where the Japanese American family had been held before they were taken to wherever it was they were going.

Photo by Dorothea Lange, May, 1942, Japanese American family being escorted to their barracks at a transit camp for internees

These were quite miserable shelters, not even up to standards of chicken coops, which is what my mother had called them. "Not fit for human beings". She said that what had happened to these people was an outrage, completely uncalled for. And she blamed a single individual for it: Earl Warren, in 1942 California Attorney General, who was the force behind the forces that sent the Japs to the concentration camps. He was the one who demanded it incessantly, went to Washington and got the orders from the President that put the whole dreadful business into motion. Earl Warren, who would become governor. He had ambitions, didn't he? It was easy to pander to the prejudices of California's Anglo population. And Warren was no slacker when it came to pandering...

But after he was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by Eisenhower, he changed. 180°, almost. Brown vs Board of Education in 1954 started a process of anti-Jim Crow and civil rights legislation and court findings that would transform the deep racial animosities and other prejudices held by so many Americans into... something else. They're not gone, not by a long shot, but they no longer hold such sway over American society and sense of justice.

Well, not like they once did at any rate.

After we passed by the pads and platforms of the no longer present temporary buildings inside the Stallion Gate on the way to Trinity Site, I spotted something reddish-brown by the side of the road. I couldn't make out what it was until we were passing right beside it and I saw the ribs sticking up: OMG, it was a cow, the carcass of a cow which had apparently perished right beside the base road and whose innards had been consumed by ravens and buzzards and coyotes and whatnot, leaving only hide and bone...

A cow? How did a cow get there? This was on base, and so far as I know, they don't run herds there. There are wild animals and hunting is permitted from time to time, but there are no cattle... are there? Maybe it got through the fence somehow and found itself unable to return to its own herd outside the boundary and perished from... lack of water? The sparseness of the forage? Loneliness? What had happened? I couldn't imagine, but I could easily imagine the presence of the cow was never even noticed by base personnel until it was too late, and then, with no orders to move it from beside the road, it was simply left to the coyotes and ravens and buzzards to deal with...

Much further on down the road, where turned off the main road to get to Trinity Site itself, there were a couple of camouflage tent-like structures near the intersection, somewhat resembling duck blinds, full of electronic equipment and a solitary soldier sitting forlorn inside them. Hum. What could they be? Beside these little tents there were bristling antennae and other sorts of gimcracks of no identifiable purpose, and I wondered, "Are they monitoring wildlife or our own selves as we head ever further into the base?" Were they monitoring our cell phones (which didn't work, by the way -- there wasn't even car radio reception on most of this journey of the dead... ) or our movements? We were ordered not to deviate off the road during our trip to Trinity Site and not to take pictures anywhere on base but at Trinity Site itself. But we saw some vehicles pull off the road here and there and saw people taking pictures where they were ordered not to. There are, after all, bunkers and other artifacts of the Trinity Test along the way to the Site, but I noticed the signs and placards that once identified them weren't maintained and no longer had legible contents.

Unlike formerly, too, at the Site itself, there were no longer any buses out to the restored McDonald Ranch where the Gadget had been assembled (though the nuclear core was inserted right under the tower where it would be hoisted up and detonated on July 16, 1945.) I had missed going to the McDonald Ranch due to time constraints when I visited the Site in 2010 and I had hoped to go this time, but a sign at the Gate said that the McDonald Ranch house was "temporarily closed" for reasons unstated.

Where the Gadget was assembled 

I wanted to go out there (it's about 2 miles from the test site) partly because one of the pioneer houses nearby our own is practically identical. It's a typical style of New Mexico homesteaders and pioneers near the turn of the 20th Century but you'd never know it existed because it doesn't fit the architectural "Style" imposed in Santa Fe and common elsewhere in New Mexico, thanks to Carlos Vierra and his friend John Gaw Meem.

Ah, but no. Not this time. Maybe next time, maybe not. There are houses like this and ruins of houses like this all over New Mexico, pioneer houses that were built of adobe and roofed with corrugated iron (called "tin") with tall, narrow windows and rough stone walls around them, built when the area was opened for homesteading around the turn of the 20th Century. Many are abandoned, as the pioneer ranch house we live in had been abandoned, because it is just too difficult to make a living out on the llano in New Mexico. The weather is too wild and unpredictable, the water is too scarce, the struggle for living too intense. It's hard to settle down and remain. The Native peoples long ago knew this, and they thought perhaps the Spanish and later the Anglos who went out in the desert and high plains to raise their livestock and to grow their crops and to build their towns were a bit mad. Or maybe they were a lot crazy. They may have had a few good years and then the droughts and the winds and the harshness of the land and the tiring work of bare survival drove them out.

Their ruins are everywhere.

The 'Gadget' on the tower before the Trinity Test, 1945 (Los Alamos National Laboratory picture)

One of the tower's stanchions after the test

And that's part of what Trinity Site represents in a less personal way. The McDonalds, at whose ranch house the Gadget was assembled, left -- they say "evacuated under protest" -- when the military took over the site for the Alamagordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in 1942, less than thirty years after the ranch was built. The house sat abandoned until the Trinity test was decided on in 1945.

Afterwards, the place was abandoned again and left to ruin until its restoration in 1984.

Typical.

McDonald Ranch House, 1974

It is said that the reason for the Trinity Test was to see whether a plutonium implosion bomb would work or not. The Little Boy uranium bomb along with several mockups had been shipped to Tinian Island in the Pacific before the test of the Gadget, and shortly after the Trinity Test, the components for the Fat Man bomb (of which the Gadget was an example of its interior) were flown to Tinian from Kirtland Field, and were assembled on Tinian for use on Nagasaki.

The stated reason for the Trinity Test was scientific, but the actual use of the bombs on Japan was political, both to accelerate the surrender of Japan, and to demonstrate to the Soviets that the United States was prepared to... what, exactly? Do anything?

The idea, obviously, was to instill fear in any potential enemy such as the Soviet Union -- already designated the Enemy of the Moment after the capitulation of Nazi Germany -- of what the United States was capable of and willing to do in pursuit of its national/international interests. While many of the nuclear scientists involved in the creation of these weapons advised against their use on human populations preferring that demonstration detonations be utilized instead, the politics of war then -- and perhaps now -- insisted that only the actual use of these weapons against the Enemy himself would be effective. It's the principle of the only thing these people understand... that we heard all the time during the Afghanistan and Iraq misadventures, and which was a typical perspective regarding "The Enemy" through all the Cold War "police actions."

Burning them alive was considered to be a highly appropriate way of Enemy extermination and disposal, especially in the Pacific and Japan during the later stages of World War II. Firebombing was used in Europe as well, but the results -- in Hamburg and Dresden especially -- seemed far too much like the results of the Nazi concentration camps' efforts to dispose of the super abundance of dead bodies that accumulated toward the end of the war.

On the other hand using flamethrowers against Japanese soldiers was considered a kind of sport, and the firebombings of Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama were celebrated as particularly appropriate punishment for the Japs. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in these pre-nuclear bombings, whereas the total number of casualties from the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is thought to be just over 120,000. The point was that these incinerations took only one bomb each, whereas hundreds of bombs were necessary to obliterate other Japanese cities. Efficiency! American know how!

During the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait in 1991, American forces unleashed a grotesque bombing raid on what is known as the Highway of Death. Thousands of retreating Iraqis were incinerated in that episode, but there were many other incidents in which the US blasted civilian targets as well, most notably on a bomb shelter in Baghdad, in which several hundred civilians were slaughtered.

All this, of course, was long ago. Nuclear weapons and nuclear energy were once seen -- or at least promoted -- as panaceas for a troubled world and suffering mankind, the bombs to "keep us safe," and the nuclear plants to provide us with "unlimited energy." Neither has quite worked out as promised. The bombs don't keep us safe, and nuclear energy is a chimera at best. There is no known way to maintain the radioactive waste products produced, and there is no way to ensure the safety of nuclear power plants in any event.

The nuclear demons unleashed at Trinity Site almost 70 years ago still haunt us and the world in general. Some still believe that enough people could survive a nuclear holocaust to make it worthwhile to consider -- or at least an interesting experiment.

J. Robert Oppenheimer Manhattan Project lead scientist saw it differently:




I'm with Oppie on this.

We'll meet again, I'm sure... in spirit if not in the flesh...

Out and About -- Again

Microseconds of the Trinity Test

Went out to Trinity Site yesterday. Because it was the only time the site would be open this year, there were larger than usual crowds, and it took close to an hour (maybe longer, come to think of it) to get cleared at the Stallion Gate.

Trinity Site, as I've written before, is a secular pilgrimage site in New Mexico, the site of the world's first atomic bomb explosion. One goes there to pay respects, not just to the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who were incinerated at the end of World War II by the two atomic bombs dropped on their country, but to the malevolent powers that were unleashed and which still haunt the world -- and haunt New Mexico in particular. I've said there is no place on earth outside Japan where the nuclear issue is so profound and profoundly moving as in New Mexico, as current and contemporary today as it ever was.

After arriving at the parking lot, I had to strategize actually getting to the site more than a quarter mile away and then getting back, as I am still lame from an episode of sciatica in January. So I got a seat-cane for the expedition, with the thought that if I were able to sit down during the trek, I'd probably be able to make it without too much trouble. (There is a transport for the old and lame from the parking lot to the site gate, but I decided to forgo it in order to test whether I could make it on my own.) Sure enough, the cane itself was sufficient to keep me appropriately propped up and walking, and I didn't have to sit on the way to or from the monument. Yay! Simple victories.

The April weather was a challenge, though. We'd been warned there might be rain, but instead, there was virga and many downdrafts which raised whirlwinds and clouds of dust and sand that got into everything. I found my wallet was full of sand and dust when we stopped for a late lunch after leaving the site. One man fell face first into the dirt in front of the monument when a gust caught him by surprise, and others were dumbfounded by the whipping whirlwinds and clouds of sand and dust pummeling them in the face. Nevertheless, the site is spectacular, and the winds and clouds added to the spectacle.

The site was essentially identical to what it had been in 2010 when I was there on my own. But this was the first time for Ms Ché, and she was quite taken with it. She and I grew up in a world in which nuclear power was seen as a panacea for practically everything that ailed mankind -- while the specter of nuclear annihilation loomed over us every single day.

Trinity Site is where that specter originated.



Yesterday's adventure there was made all the more dramatic by the dramatic weather knocking us and everyone else around so much.

After a brief return home to clean up, we headed back to Albuquerque to attend a fundraiser for the National Institute of Flamenco whose home base burned last February December. The program included 9 regional dance companies each of which performed one or two numbers to a wildly enthusiastic response by the full house at the Disney Theatre of the National Hispanic Cultural Center.

There were many highlights, but one that will stay with us for a good long time was the performance of Sonia Olla and Ismael Fernandez who demonstrated -- as if there were any doubts -- what this "flamenco" thing is all about. It was brilliant. But then, so was practically everything at the event. 

It was yet another day and night to remember, and yet another "Only in New Mexico" experience.

Disturbing

 
The finale of "Dr. Strangelove" -- Vera Lynn singing, nuclear weapons exploding

We spent the day in town yesterday, starting at a New Mexico PBS Science Cafe at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, a place we've been meaning to visit for years but never have.

The topic was the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi some two years ago, and the speaker was Dr. Ronald Knief, Nuclear Engineer and Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories (pdf link) and Associate Professor of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering at the University of New Mexico.

Yes, well.

He's been at most of the major meltdowns in the last few decades, including Three Mile Island -- where he said he spent ten years -- as well as Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Just lucky, I guess.

He explained the process of nuclear power generation very well, though I suspect that most of those in attendance knew how a reactor worked as well as he did as there are a lot of attendees at these things from the nuclear labs and facilities that dot the area. You can't truly escape Nuclear Science culture here in New Mexico, any more than you can escape the Spanish,  Indians and the artists, and the truth is, we don't try.

Having lived many years in California in the shadow of a nuclear power plant which was the twin of Three Mile Island -- and which ran into so many malfunctions and shutdowns and whatnot that eventually voters decided to shut it down permanently and decommission it, much to the relief of residents, and (perhaps surprisingly) much to the relief of their pocketbooks in the end  -- I was fairly familiar with operations of a Three Mile Island kind of reactor, but Fukushima Daiishi was not designed like the reactors at Three Mile Island.

Instead, the Japanese plants were like the Oyster Creek reactor in New Jersey. It appears from the schematics that these are much more complicated plants than those at Three Mile Island (or Rancho Seco), and the Oyster Creek model appears to be more obviously -- I mean really obviously -- dangerous. Many more things can go wrong, and once they go wrong, whoopsy!

Yet our speaker yesterday, while not making light at all of what happened at Fukushima, didn't seem to see it that way. With all the redundant safety precautions built into the plant, and with the unexpected severity of the earthquake and tsunami, the plant had performed very well under the circumstances, the explosions that occurred were "just as designed", and the release of toxic nuclear material was minor. The only plant workers who died, he said, died as a result of the tsunami, not from release of radiation or toxic nuclear material. More people, he said, were at risk in the evacuation than from the plant itself, and up to a thousand actually died in the evacuation, he said. Given the 25,000 dead and missing from the natural disaster, the losses due to the nuclear accident were minor. Perspective, people!

He showed charts and graphs that demonstrated just how minor the release of nuclear radiation and toxic material was and is, and how workers at the plant have never really been exposed to high levels of radiation, as they were, for example, at Chernobyl.  The Chernobyl meltdown was orders of magnitude worse, he said.

Most of those in attendance seemed to accept his assessment -- he is a world-renown nuclear expert after all -- but some were quite disturbed by it. Or rather, by the implications of it. I asked at one point whether -- since according to him there are no health risks from the destruction of the plant -- whether the residents of Fukushima Town and the rest of the evacuation area had been allowed to return. He danced around an answer, saying he thought maybe people had been allowed to return to their homes in the outer evacuation area, but he wasn't sure, and that in Fukushima and closer in, he thought people were allowed day trips in -- to get their things and whatnot -- but he didn't think they were allowed to stay. I asked if he could estimate how close to the plant people are allowed to live; he said he couldn't. One other attendee said she thought it was 20 kilometers (12 miles). He didn't dispute it. In other words, the evacuation zone is still in effect, despite the lack of ill-effects from radiation and contamination -- according to Knief -- due to the Fukushima disaster.

He said it would easily take 40 years or more to complete the clean up of the plant, while clean up at Three Mile Island "only" took ten years. This is rather striking. Of course we were told there was no significant radiation or toxic leak from Three Mile Island, either, yet it took ten years to clean it up. We are now being told that there have been no significant radiation or toxic leaks from Fukushima Daiichi, and it will take a minimum of 40 years to clean it up.

Great.

Another attendee said (all quotes in this post are paraphrases), "You've pointed out that 'nobody could have anticipated' the severity of the earthquake or the height of the tsunami, yet any graduate student could easily have done so given the fault lines near the site and the history of tsunamis in Japan, some of which have been a good deal higher than the one that overwhelmed Fukushima. Any graduate student could have predicted what happened. Yet the government of Japan and the experts at TEPCO couldn't?"

Knief said, "They might have, I suppose, but they didn't. They designed for the worst they thought would happen, and they were wrong. But their design worked very well until the plant lost power, and there was nothing they could do about that..."

According to what we were told, the plant lost power because the reactors themselves shut down automatically when the earthquake hit. The transmission lines for power from other sources were knocked out by the earthquake as well. The diesel generators at the Fukushima site kicked in as they were supposed to when the power went off, but within half an hour, the unexpectedly high tsunami hit, swamping the generators and knocking them out of commission. The final back up was a series of storage batteries that only had a few hours' charge, and there was no way to recharge them. Once the batteries were exhausted, there was no power at the plant. A "station blackout." TEPCO attempted to get new generators to the plant but was unable to due to traffic and destroyed roads. The tsunami had also washed away the fuel storage tanks for the generators on site. So even if they had been able to get the generators to Fukushima, there was no fuel for them and they would have been useless.

So things followed their natural course. Three of the reactor containment buildings exploded -- as they were designed to do we were told -- due to the build up of hydrogen vented into the containments from the reactors as they heated up from lack of cooling water. One of the reactors' cooling water toruses was breached and contaminated water was released into a holding tank below. There was a fire in a few of the spent fuel rod tanks, but the fire was contained, and there were few/no toxic releases. On and on.

The plant is in cold shutdown now and clean up is proceeding. Nothing to see here, please carry on for the next 40 years or so...

All the other nuclear plants in Japan have been shut down as well, and alternative fuels are proving to be very expensive, so he thinks that the undamaged nuclear plants should be returned to service; there may be a slight risk, but there is a trade-off in that the cost of running electric plants on natural gas or oil is so high that the risk may be worth it.

One attendee questioned the validity of Knief's charts and graphs showing no health risk at all from radiation and toxic materials released from Fukushima. "Has the media been hyping the situation over there?"  He said, "Yes, it has." "How?" she asked. The response was essentially that there have been no adverse affects to the health of individuals near the plant, and that experience from other instances of radiation exposure (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he said are really the driving psychological events behind the hype and the fear of the Fukushima event) indicates that a certain level of low dosage radiation could be healthful.

By this point, some people were getting pretty annoyed, so the open discussion was shut down, but Knief stuck around for private consultation.

We took the opportunity to tour the museum, which we found to be in its own way quite as annoying as the Science Cafe speaker. Well, "annoying," is that the right word?

Perhaps not. Evocative. Aggravating. Propagandistic. Stomach churning.

Anyone who grew up under the threat of instant incineration from nuclear annihilation like we did is going to be... moved, and quite possibly sickened, by the accumulations and displays of bombs (at least their casings) and missiles and planes and all the other panoply and mechanisms of nuclear war housed at the museum.

Worse, at least in my view, was the justification of it.

"We did these things and had these weapons because of the threat from the Soviet Union, and anyone who questioned that threat (such as J. Robert Oppenheimer) deserved what they got. Shut up."

I'd seen many B-52s in flight and on the ground in my time (you couldn't escape them living near an Air Force base, especially during the Vietnam War) but I'd never been that close to one. The one on display is set up as if it were being loaded with nuclear tipped guided missiles, and when you think about it, you can't help shuddering.

In the background by the fence it looked like there was a bomb casing such as the one Slim Pickens rode down in "Dr. Strangelove."

There were all kinds of missiles on display including put-together and dismantled ICBMs, which again, I'd never seen close up. There were random parts of a B-47 stacked up on the ground, and the conning tower of a nuclear submarine which they are raising money to restore and put on display. There was the obligatory nuclear cannon. There was a B-29 next to the B-52, looking quite diminutive and modest by comparison.

Every size and type of nuclear device, from The Gadget of 1945 and the Trinity test, to the tiniest hand-carried bomb (57 pounds, launchable from a bazooka-like apparatus), to the most hideous looking hydrogen device, to a couple of the "broken arrows" -- nuclear weapons, whoops!, lost from planes or otherwise gone astray... was on display, and in a corner was an old teevee playing a loop of Civil Defense films from the 1950's, in a mock up of a fallout shelter from the era, stocked with barrels of "Drinking Water", and cans of "Food". Only one cot, though.

Yes, well.

Propaganda posters, nuclear cars, trains, planes, and nuclear medicine were all highlighted. In the "lounge" -- decorated with Mid-Century furniture and other items -- was playing one of the Frontline videos of the Fukushima disaster. How about that.

I noted that young adults wanted to have their pictures taken with the bombs, especially the Fat Man and Little Boy mockups. Older people were... either quiet or trying to laugh off what they were seeing.

Was it real? Did we really go through this?

Trinity Site functions as a memorial. There isn't even a hint of celebration there. When people approach the site in a celebratory or expectant mood, they leave in solemnity bordering on depression. As they think about what began there, there is no escape from the psychological horror of it.

Despite his obvious enthusiasm for nuclear power Knief did seem to recognize the severe psychological effects of the various disasters that have accompanied the development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and to his credit, he didn't try to dismiss them.

Then we went to yet another literary event...

[I'll try to provide some links later... right now, we're getting ready for another literary afternoon...]

Ruins

Abandoned and ruined motel in Mountainair, New Mexico 2007, photo by the author


Ruins

One thing you get used to seeing in New Mexico is ruins. You encounter them all the time here. There are the spectacular ruins such as at Chaco Canyon, an abandoned Native American trading and religious center turned into national park, and there are the more ordinary ruins of abandoned adobe buildings in practically every town and in the vintage neighborhoods of the one big city, Albuquerque.

Ruins. It’s a fact of being here.

On that note, I’ll mention that twice a year, on the first Saturday of April and October, White Sands opens the Trinity Site to public access and inspection. So I went yesterday, as I have never been, and the weather was glorious, and I needed to do it. Nothing has more strongly affected the lives of my generation than the atom bomb, certainly nothing in the outer world was more elemental to our childhoods than the Bomb and what it would do to us and all those pesky foreigners, mostly Russians, who wanted our stuff.

So I drove out to the Stallion Range Gate, out of San Antonio, and I thought at first it wouldn’t be too crowded because the balloons were mass ascentioning in 'Burque to kick off the Balloon Fiesta, and surely everyone wanted to attend that, yes? Driving the back roads of New Mexico, you’re often the only vehicle in sight, and even on the Interstate, you might be in a nearly traffic free area. So traffic seemed heavy heading out of San Antonio, what with five or six cars visible going my way, and a handful coming back.

When I got to the gate, I was surprised at the back up, and how very, very slowly cars were being let onto the base. One was given some “Don’t You Dare!” literature along with a brochure about the Bomb and the test on July 16, 1945, that took place at Trinity Site, and then one proceeded to the Security Checkpoint where one showed one’s picture ID to the private security guard and declared that one had no weapons or alcohol. Then one was waved in for the 17 mile, not altogether unscenic, drive to the parking lot.

Once there, I was kind of taken aback by the number of people who’d come out to see the sights at Trinity. There were thousands, and it was set up very much like a fair, though without the rides and the exhibit halls.

It was a hike of about a quarter mile from the parking lot to the Site of the nuclear test itself. On the way, I noticed that the test took place nearly up against the mountains, with a broad open plain to the west, which was surprising. I’ve seen films of the Trinity test and many other nuclear tests, most of which took place in Nevada, where the test site is surrounded by mountains. I just assumed the Trinity test was surrounded by mountains as well. But it isn’t. It’s not even that far out in the middle of nowhere. In fact, there were a couple of commandeered ranches within a couple of miles of the test site, at one of which the Bomb was assembled.

I noticed, too, that the streams of people headed to the Site on foot were eager (I think that’s the right word) if not exactly festive, and nearly everyone streaming back to the parking lot had downcast eyes and looked very… contemplative.

A secular pilgrimage that had a powerful spiritual effect on the crowds.

Which was surprising and not at the same time. You hike the quarter mile to the Trinity Site, and you enter a large relatively flat fenced off space, a bowl as it were, where, to your right, you see the lava rock obelisk that marks Ground Zero (here, the term is used properly) with the mountains forming a backdrop, and to the left, some distance away, you see a flatbed truck with a model of the Fatman bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, and further left is a low metal building (that is not accessible) that covers a portion of the original ground surface left after the test explosion. There are some pictures on the fence to the north. And that, exactly, is it. There is nothing else there.

There were many children there yesterday, and none of them were acting up. Think about that for a moment. Some were on their haunches, picking through the dust for specks of “Trinitite” -- the green glassy stuff the heat of the Bomb turned the ground into. They found some but not much. Most of it, says one of the signs, was scraped up and saved by the military after the test. In fact, the site has been extensively altered since the test, and much of what was there or what you might expect to see there is long since gone. It has been graded and scraped, and is kept mowed. It looks barren, in contrast to the landscape outside the fence, which is in a fairly natural desert condition, dry but not at all barren, with considerable plant and (one assumes) animal life. (The landscape all around is highly evocative of parts of the Mojave -- lots of yucca and low bushes, no Joshua trees, though -- which I found interesting…)

As the children picked through the dust to find “Trinitite”, they now and then came across rabbit droppings, which they mistook for the glassy substance, and had to be corrected.

There were many young adults, some of them couples. What a place for a honeymoon. Or what you will. There was a fair sprinkling of coots and geezers, for whom, of course, this place is a kind of sacred ground, but its sanctity is emotionally complicated. I know I felt that way. There were surprisingly few middle-aged people, and those that were there seemed not to know how to connect with the place and what happened there. Which was… interesting.

But the fact is that people leave the barren bowl where the test took place, and they are almost all head-down and silent. Whatever they thought about what they were going to see is changed by what they do see, and moreso by what they feel. The world was changed forever by what happened here, in ways that reverberate and echo to this day, and yet what there is to mark it is little more than dust and rocks and rabbit droppings, and twice a year, you can go see for yourself. And ponder.

You pass the ruins of a bunker on the way out of the base, and near the Stallion Range Gate itself, there is a very odd ruin, what was once an elaborate tent, a fabric covered accessory building, the fabric partially torn away, the metal ribs of the structure stark against the brilliant desert sky. Inside you can see desks and file cabinets, a chair or two, what could be a chart on what’s left of a wall. The whole thing looks very organic, like a huge beached sea creature of some sort. And like so many other ruins in New Mexico, it just sits there. Abandoned. Ignored. Eventually becoming part of the landscape. Not entirely natural, but not entirely not. Obviously human created, and now human forgotten.

Eventually, that will be the fate of the Trinity Site as well.

(10/10/10: Adding a video of the site that I took when I was at Trinity. Camera batteries were failing however, and the sun was so bright I could not see what I was video-ing. Oh well. Some of the feeling of the place is evident just the same...)