With World War II still raging in the Pacific, anyone in Bernalillo awake in the wee hours of July 12 or July 13, 1945, would pay little heed to two short Army convoys passing heading south.
Some in the caravan were military personnel, most notably a woman at the wheel of a dark-colored sedan in the first group. The rest of the passengers were civilian scientists whose herculean efforts in Los Alamos were about to change the world forever.
Critical to their mission was top-secret cargo: the first atomic bomb headed for Trinity Site on what is now White Sands Missile Range. The test blast a few days later would settle whether such a bomb would work and possibly shorten the war.
The first caravan departed Los Alamos at 1 a.m. on July 12 and included the sedan driven by a WAC, one of a dozen or so members of the Women’s Army Corp. A case on its backseat held the two plutonium cores, which would create the violent nuclear chain reaction.
Just after midnight the next morning, a truck took off with “the Gadget” secured to its bed. Modestly nicknamed the Gadget for security reasons, it was a steel sphere about five feet in diameter that would focus high explosives on the radioactive cores.
(Gadget: an often small mechanical or electronic device with a practical use but often thought of as a novelty – Merriam-Webster Dictionary.)
The cores, when smashed together on July 16, split the plutonium atoms in a violent chain reaction turning unproven theory into a weapon of mass destruction. While the bomb did no set the sky on fire as some feared, it lit up south-central New Mexico and rattled windows in Gallup nearly 200 miles to the northwest.
“Members of the crew and passengers aboard a Santa Fe railway train near Mountainair thought they saw a bomber explode and burn in the sky,” the Albuquerque Journal reported. “So brilliant was the flash from the explosion Miss Georgia Green of Socorro, blind University of New Mexico student, exclaimed “What was that.”
The news media accepted the military statement about an ammunition dump at the Alamogordo Army Air Field had blown up. Earlier, Manhattan Engineer District commander Brig. Gen. Leslie Groves, without saying why, alerted Gov. John Dempsey there might be need for evacuations and martial law.
Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist later dubbed the Father of the Atomic Bomb, already knew of remote location for developing the bomb having visited the Los Alamos Ranch School as a teen in the 1920s. “My two great loves are physics and New Mexico,” he once wrote.
At the time the school was in Sandoval County with Los Alamos becoming the state’s smallest county in 1949 although it remained closed to outsiders until 1957. A movie simply titled “Oppenheimer” opening this week follows the scientist from his triumph during in the war through his tragic downfall during the Red Scare of the early 1950s.
Perched at 7,300 feet elevation between the canyons scarring Pajarito Mesa, the all-male prep school with a cowboy lifestyle was almost more accessible on horseback than motor vehicle. The one road even improved for the war effort provided a tense ride for the Trinity caravans clinging to cliffs as they dropped 1,300 feet in the 10 miles to the Rio Grande.
At Pojoaque, the road joined U.S. Highway 285, a hard-surfaced route climbing to Santa Fe and a junction with U.S. 85, which would evolve into Interstate 25. Descending to near the Rio Grande, U.S. 85 was comparatively flat as it continued south through Santa Ana and Sandia pueblos, Albuquerque and Socorro to U.S. 380 at San Antonio.
Ten miles east ranch roads improved for the bomb test led 25 miles south to the Trinity base camp where the Gadget was assembled and then detonated after a 90-minute weather delay at 5:29 a.m. Mountain War Time.
Even in the name of secrecy, the main paved highways through the state’s two largest population centers were the safest and most secure route to transport the bomb materials.
“It was simple logic,” said Jim Eckles, a veteran of semi-annual open houses at Trinity Site during his 30 years in the Public Affairs Office at White Sands Missile Range. “It doesn’t make sense they’d drive the back roads.”
Any other route would only add to the 230-mile drive. Even if one of the vehicles crashed, the plutonium wouldn’t react on its own, and the Gadget would largely contain the high explosives inside even though it vaporized in the test.
“There was no way they were going to carry the cores that way,” the author of “Trinity: The History of an Atomic Bond National Landmark,” said. “It was the fastest, direct and safest way to travel.”
The speed limit at the time had been cut to 45 mph to save gasoline and because the rationing of civilian tires meant many in use were old or patched multiple times. The priority given the Manhattan Project meant better tires and perhaps liberties with the speed limit, as physicist Phillip Morrison recalled 15 years later.
Morrison hitched a ride from Los Alamos to Trinity in the sedan carrying the plutonium cores. His only safety concern was the driver, saying he was “rather afraid of the fast driving young woman who drove us down there with the convoy, who was really high-speed … pedal to the floor all the way. The driver was the scariest thing.”
Los Alamos was not bereft of women with the presence of scientists’ wives, civilian employees and a handful of skilled scientists. While the name of Morrison’s driver didn’t surface in researching this article, she was one of about 400 WACs who served in Los Alamos and other Manhattan District locations in clerical, medical, technical and scientific positions during the war.
WACs at Los Alamos worked six days a week as did laboratory workers.
“Elsie Pierce, however, who was a motor transport driver, said the army was on duty twenty-four hours a day,” Kathleen E. B. Manley, Ph.D., wrote in the New Mexico Historical Review after interviewing Pierce in 1982. “She recalled that people didn’t worry about days off; everyone was there for a purpose and worked as long as he or she was needed.”
Three weeks after the Trinity test, the Army Air Corps dropped the first atomic bomb used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan, followed three days later by the second blast over Nagasaki. With fatality estimates ranging from 100,000-200,000, Japan surrendered on Aug. 15 nearly three months after the war in Europe ended.
Trinity Site National Historic Landmark is open annually to visitors for one day in April and October. A full-size replica of the Gadget is on display at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, while Los Alamos is home to both the Los Alamos History Museum and the Bradbury Science Museum.