at Trinity that Monday morning must go down as one of the
most significant events in the last thousand years.

Surprisingly little has been written on Trinity. In 1946, Wil-
liam L. Laurence, distinguished science correspondent for the
New York Times, wrote his book Dawn Over Zero. As Laurence
was the only newsman to observe the blast, his version is the
account of record. Nine years later, Time magazine reporter Lan-
sing Lamont published his lively study Day of Trinity. Although
the book is unfortunately marred by errors of fact, even J. Robert
Oppenheimer, director of Los Alamos, admitted that Lamont
captured the mood of the time with perfection. ² In 1976, the
official account by Harvard physicist Kenneth T. Bainbridge,
who oversaw all the on-site operations, was declassified by the
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Bainbridge's encyclopedic
pamphlet lists all the personnel and all the experiments involved
in the test. ³

But much remains to be told. By 1983, the federal government
had declassified the majority of the relevant materials on the
Manhattan Engineer District, or Manhattan Project (the code
name for America's atomic bomb program). Numerous partici-
pants have also published their memoirs or diaries. With a per-
spective of almost forty years, it is time again to reexamine the
story of the Trinity Site explosion.

The blast occurred in a stretch of the high New Mexico desert
that was originally part of the Camino Real. This was the royal
road north from Mexico City to the farthermost regions of Span-
ish settlement in upper New Mexico. By the early twentieth
century, however, the area had been turned into ranch land, and
thousands of sheep and cattle grazed the region as best they
could. The state of New Mexico owned most of the land but
leased it to the ranchers at a nominal cost.

With the outbreak of World War II, the federal government
requested the area for use as a practice bombing range. Thou-
sands of acres were leased to the government, with the assump-
tion that they would be returned to the ranchers after the war
was over. In 1944, a search team under Major General Leslie R.
Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, selected the
region as the best site for the Trinity test. In about six months,
the intense efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers, civilian con-

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