Word: alamogordo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reagan's determination to exorcise the demons of Alamogordo and Hiroshima explains the insistence in the strategic concept that defenses too must be nonnuclear. Some of Reagan's own Star Wars planners privately feel that the language of the document is too restrictive, since some possible schemes for S.D.I. would require nuclear explosions in order to work (see following story). While Reagan takes seriously the goal of a nuclear-free world, most members of his Government still do not. "It's there in our rhetoric because the President wants it there, and he's the boss," says a Pentagon official...
...from the moment it conceived it. Seeing what man had wrought, the people involved in the Manhattan Project almost immediately began to use language in order to deny what they saw, calling the Hiroshima bomb Little Boy, and sending a coded message to report the first successful test at Alamogordo that read, "Babies satisfactorily born"-as if to urge innocence on evil. After Hiroshima, the historical fact could not be expunged; still one could avoid looking at the weapon directly. Only its inventors never seemed to shrink from their creation. The day of the Alamogordo explosion, J. Robert Oppenheimer stared...
...parking lot, members of the Alamogordo Chamber of Commerce busily hand out leaflets warning that radiation on the site is still above average levels. A booklet adds that it is only one-fifth as great as the radiation received from a chest X ray. No eating, drinking or smoking is permitted within the ten-acre, fenced-in area around ground zero, lest radioactive materials be ingested. "What's a little radiation?" scoffs 14-year-old Lee Hutchinson, visiting Trinity for the second time. "It's bad at Three Mile Island because that's in the middle...
...certainly is. One hundred and fifty miles from the southern border of New Mexico and just over 100 miles from Alamogordo, the site lies between two jagged mountain ranges in a valley named by the conquistadors Jornada del Muerto (Dead Man's Walk). It is remote and entirely unpopulated, the perfect testing ground for the plutonium monster that the "longhairs" were concocting at Los Alamos in 1944. That winter Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, was pressed to give the site a code name. The erudite scientist glanced down at some lines of John Donne...