Trinity Site Tour

2 times a year they open up the Trinity Site so people can tour it. It's always the first Saturday in October and April. It's about 50 miles from Alamogordo, NM. This is where they built and tested the first atomic bomb before dropping it on Hiroshima Japan on August 6, 1945. There's still radiation present at the site. My uncle helped to perfect the trigger on the bomb. It was very interesting to learn about this piece of history. This first picture is us, minus Chase because he was being grumpy, standing at the monument that said "Trinity Site. Where the world's first nuclear device was exploded on July 16, 1945."




The first atomic bomb built was originally supposed to be detonated in this casing that was capped on both ends. They decided to detonate it atop a 100 ft tower instead. But in this casing they did detonate eight 500 pound bombs and this is what was left.
This is a picture of all that's left of the foundation where the bomb was detonated.


This is what 'trinitite' looks like. The ground turned to glass from the heat of the explosion. It still contains radiation, and there was a sign that said "removal of trinitite is theft of government property and can result in fines and jail time". I don't know why anyone would want to take some home as a souvenir, especially with it still being radioactive! The kids had fun searching the ground to find some though, but don't worry, we didn't steal any :)





This was a copy of a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt on Aug 2, 1939. The letter basically said that the possibility of atomic weapons were realistic possibilities because of the discovery of uranium, and that a friend of his, Leo Szilard, was worried that Nazi Germany would develop the weapon first. The letter didn't have much effect on Pres Roosevelt at the time. A month later, Germany invaded Poland which started WW2. On October 11, a little over 2 months after Einstein wrote the letter, President Roosevelt's unofficial adviser, Alexander Sachs, showed the letter to Roosevelt. Finally, the project to develop the bomb began on Dec 6, 1941, the day before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The project was known as "The Manhattan Project".

I hope you didn't mind the history lecture, I just found it all to be so interesting and learned alot! This is what I enjoy about being in the military. Getting to go places and learn all you can about the place you're at, and then go somewhere else and learn some more. I loved living on Okinawa for so many reasons but one of them being that there was so much history on that little island. You come to respect a place when you learn of the history it possesses. Being here at Holloman AFB in New Mexico hasn't been my favorite place we've been, but learning about it's history has helped make it an adventure.....and, uh, being here while Transformers 2 was here filming and Eric getting to be in the movie and getting to see the autobots up close and Eric getting a pic taken with Josh Duhamel while on the set of Transformers 2 is also pretty darn cool :)