文档介绍：TRINITY SITE
TRINITY SITE
the . Department of Energy
National Atomic Museum,
Albuquerque, New Mexico
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TRINITY SITE
The First Atomic Test
On Monday morning July 16, 1945, the world was changed forever
when the first atomic bomb was tested in an isolated area of the New
Mexico desert. Conducted in the final month of World War II by the top-
secret Manhattan Engineer District, this test was code named Trinity. The
Trinity test took place on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range,
about 230 miles south of the Manhattan Project's headquarters at Los
Alamos, New Mexico. Today this 3,200 square mile range, partly
located in the desolate Jornada del Muerto Valley, is named the White
Sands Missile Range and is actively used for non-nuclear weapons testing.
Before the war the range was mostly public and private grazing land
that had always been sparsely populated. During the war it was even
more lonely and deserted because the ranchers had agreed to vacate their
homes in January 1942. They left because the War Department wanted
the land to use as an artillery and bombing practice area. In September
1944, a remote 18 by 24 square mile portion of the north- east corner of
the Bombing Range was set aside for the Manhattan Project and the
Trinity test by the military.
The selection of this remote location in the Jornada del Muerto Valley
for the Trinity test was from an initial list of eight possible test sites.
Besides the Jornada, three of the other seven sites were also located in
New Mexico: the Tularosa Basin near Alamogordo, the lava beds (now the
El Malpais National Monument) south of Grants, and an area southwest of
Cuba and north of Thoreau. Other possible sites not located in New
Mexico were: an Army training area north of Blythe, California, in the
Mojave Desert; San Nicolas Island (one of the Channel Islands) off the
coast of Southern California; and on Padre Island south of Corpus Christi,
Texas, in the Gulf of Mexico.