History  

The First Ground Zero

by Ralph Pray

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Flat, barren, desolate, a waterless hell of windblown sand . . . and at its center, a slight depression in the ground, marking the place of man's first great insult to the earth: Trinity Site, Ground Zero of the first explosion of an atom bomb. Here, on the sands of New Mexico, at 5:29 a.m., July 16, 1945, the bomb went off, vaporizing the massive steel tower that held it and melting the sand at its feet into a carpet of green glass.

Then the powers that had built the site abandoned it. But the glass endured — a splotchy green circle 200 feet in diameter, dull by night, bright by day, a monument to man's inhumanity to man. This monument was surrounded by a high fence, tight strands of barbed wire, and multilingual warning signs. The gate in the fence was chained with three padlocks — two put there by government agencies — serving as links in the chain.

If you got through any of the three, you could gain admission to Trinity Site. And that's what I did. In July, 1951, I entered the site, and I took the glass.

Let me explain.

Federal agencies had been sponsoring an annual trek to worship at Trinity, and the green disc of radioactive glass was there for innocents to pray over. While living in the remote desert of northern New Mexico I had seen an aerial photograph of the site in a popular magazine. It looked like a giant scab. It was an impurity waiting to be taken away. Writers wrote about it. I was determined to remove it without a trace of publicity. My self-appointed task was to gain entry to the government glass and haul it off for burial, to repair the desert, clean away the radioactive afterbirth.

I was in the Army at the time — a draftee stationed at the Guided Missile School at Ft. Bliss, Texas. My buddy, Jesse Petty, a fellow draftee from Carrizozo, New Mexico, went to the unguarded site, melted one of the links with his gas torch, and put his own padlock in its place. Jesse had volunteered, "I'll go out there and cut the chain for you and put on a new padlock, but I won't go in there, not for anything."

My plan was to drive a truck to the site, use my key to open the lock, remove the radioactive glass called Trinitite, and transport it to the Los Alamos area for proper burial. Los Alamos, New Mexico, was the place where the bomb was produced. It would leave from the beautiful desert and go back where it came from.

I bought a used red pickup truck at El Paso Dodge. For money, I used my army pay and profits from weekend sales in Santa Fe of silver filigree jewelry and other items bought in Juarez, across the bridge from El Paso.

One Saturday, after electronics lab at the army missile school, the truck took me north through Alamogordo and Carrizozo, then west. I followed Jesse's map and turned south off the lonely highway onto a thin blacktop road speckled with deep chuckholes. The sand blown over the road showed no sign of tire marks. There was nothing, no one, for many miles. I was used to the army, the noisy barracks, months of technical lectures, hundreds of men. Where was everyone? Was I crazy?

I slowed down and gripped the wheel tightly to steer around the pits in the road. The floorboards were rattling as I shifted to second gear. I scrolled through memories. Did I have a chip on my shoulder about anything that would land me in this authentically Godforsaken place? I loved the desert and its quiet cleanliness, but so did almost everyone who had seen much of it. Here I was in the middle of nowhere, driving this little truck. What was driving me?

My apprenticeship in weaponry had been in war-time defense plants during high school. Beginning at fifteen, in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, I wired, soldered, assembled and tested sonar systems designed to detect Japanese submarines entering U.S. waters. My most exciting times were weekends and summer months finishing the ten-buoy array to protect San Francisco Harbor. Then came a job at seventeen as apprentice electrician in a 105-millimeter shell factory in Euclid, Ohio, where too few of us produced thousands of shells around the clock. Finally, still a teenager in the last months of the war, I worked at Brush Development in Cleveland, where we manufactured the wire recorders used during the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Those had been years of excitement and progress. There were no regrets. After 1945 I had traveled and worked throughout the west in one great adventure after another. I couldn't imagine any man in his early twenties having lived a better or more exciting life.

But one realization haunted me:

"We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely calm. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture,

'Now I become Death,
the destroyer of worlds.'

I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."

Those were the words that Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, wrote about the first minutes after the blast. Perhaps these words drove me; perhaps they were the guiding force behind my mission. I could remove the obvious signs of the first destruction, clean up the mess, do more than just leave tire tracks in the sand.

A long line of stubby telephone poles appeared ahead of me. The cross ties were only four or five feet off the ground. Wires sagged between them; many lines were lying broken on the ground, abandoned to the wind and the fiercely-blown sand. I spoke out loud to my windshield.

"They've thrown this place away, left it to rot, to fall apart."

I thought of pulling the poles out of the ground and burning them, but that would take days and would have to wait until the glass was cleaned up.

About fifteen parallel wires made up what I had read were over one thousand miles of arming, power, firing and information lines stretching between the distant control bunkers and whatever lay ahead.

The road and the poles led to the fence, to the locked gate. I parked and fished the keys out of my army fatigue jacket. I examined the chain and visualized General Groves, Manhattan Project Manager, confidently snapping the army padlock shut.

"Sorry, General, to go around you, but we're not quite finished here."

My key worked. Good old Jesse. I swung the double gate open and drove in.

There was the glass!

It was certainly not attractive. It was a scattering of dull, hardened goop. As I drove to its center, the sound of my tires on the virgin glass was like breaking soda crackers. The small depression at ground zero was maybe a foot lower than the surroundings. I saw a concrete pier sticking out of the sand. It was the stump of one of the four tower legs. No other trace of the 100-foot tall, heavy steel tower remained. The concrete would easily have been shattered with a stick or two, maybe three pounds, of sixty percent blasting dynamite. But the 15 kiloton (thirty-million pound) fireball didn't get all of it that morning in '45.

I wondered how long could I stay there and not be affected by the radiation. The best answer right then was "not long." I grabbed the shovel out of the truck and scooped up enough glass to fill a cardboard carton. Then I drove to the gate, closed and locked it, and peeled out of my boots. They could have been radioactive. I tossed them in the truck bed and drove away.

A rock shop in El Paso was the next phase of my Trinitite Project. The owner tested my box of green glass with a Geiger counter. The radioactivity was mild, too low to be harmful during my projected hours of nearness, lower even than his samples of high-grade uranium ore. I would not need to dress in shielded clothing when I went back.

One thing I would need was a screen to separate the sand from the glass. If I shoveled the glass onto a screen hanging steeply off the side of the truck, it would slide into the truck bed, and the sand would fall through the screen and onto the ground.

I drew up the plans for a folding screen that would be attached to the truck and visited an El Paso hardware store for the parts. A rake would come in handy too, if I wanted to make little piles of glass for the shovel.

Ralph L. James from Dallas, another fellow draftee student at the Guided Missile School, rode shotgun on my second trip to Trinity Site. I needed a camera operator, and James, an astute insurance agent before the Korean War draft, agreed to go as long as I'd put him up overnight in Santa Fe. His comment when he first saw the poles and wires was, "Hey, this looks serious."

When we got to the gate and I pulled the chain apart, he balked. "I'm not going in there. You're out of your mind."

"Could be, R L, but there's something to do here."

"Listen, they won't ask any questions. They'll just shoot us."

"There's nobody around, not for thirty miles."

"There could be long-range guns aimed at us right now. These people were smart enough to do this. They can do anything. We're nothing."

"I'm going in, R L, driving in. I'm going for a truckload of the glass. You can wait here."

"Can we just sit here outside the gate for ten minutes to see if anyone shows up?"

"Sure, buddy. I'll re-lock the gate while we wait if it'll make you feel better."

"No. That's okay. I just think this is the wildest thing I've ever been involved in or even heard about. I'm shocked. I've known you for over six months night and day and never suspected you were this wacky."

"Once we get inside, the photos you take will prove it."

"You're funny. Okay. I'm ready. Let's get it over with."

I drove in and got to work. I raked little piles of Trinitite to the center of thirty-foot circles and shoveled the stuff onto the screen. The glass slid into the truck, and the sand fell through. Fine. I did ten circles with about fifty pounds in each. While I shoveled, two fighter planes from White Sands flew high overhead.

At 500 pounds the little truck had a load. There was plenty of Trinitite left for future trips. James took a picture of me standing on Jumbo, the shell that was built to contain the plutonium in case fission failed. Jumbo was cast aside before Zero Hour. Then there was a shot of me at Ground Zero, and another one at the gate on our way out.

"Boy," he said, "I was never so glad to leave any place in my life. I'd almost rather stay in the army than go back in that creepy enclosure."

"Well, we're outta there. The only thing worrying me is those fighter planes. If they saw us they may call some security outfit."

"They were pretty high up there," James said. "Now what?"

"North to Albuquerque, then Santa Fe — maybe four or five hours with this heavy load."

"Who gets the glass?"

We turned west on the blacktop highway to Socorro. "It'll end up with Verne Byrnes, a mining engineer in Santa Fe. He's in charge of the burial detail."

"How do you know him?"

I could picture Verne with his little pot belly. "He owns the Pennsylvania Mine in the Cerrillos Mountains. Two years ago, I was working a mine nearby and helped bail the water out of the Penn shaft. Santa Fe's not crowded. You get to know everybody. You'll see."

We went through Albuquerque and continued north. Santa Fe was my favorite city in the U.S. There was nothing remotely like it. We dropped off the Trinitite, spent a wonderful night in Santa Fe, and drove back to the base Sunday night.

The Oscuro Mountains, far to the east of the site, might have had some kind of spotters for aircraft or for the German V-2's being tested at White Sands. Thinking about that, I decided to go in for the rest of the glass after dark. Raking and shoveling in darkness would be a problem, but I thought that a flashlight taped to each handle might do the trick. I fashioned a hood and slitted mask out of cardboard for each headlight of the truck; then, late on a Friday night, I began my first nocturnal trip, alone now, and anxious.

I turned off the highway at 2 a.m. and taped on the headlight masks. The truck didn't like the potholes at night, so I changed the headlight slits to direct more light on the road. We crept along carefully. About two miles south of the highway, a herd of small antelope dashed across my path. Then a large mound in the road ahead turned out to be a tortoise that I had to drive around. A minute later a coyote came along, skittering almost sideways when he neared the truck. Along the pole and wire line, a shiny log revealed itself as a porcupine. Jackrabbits sat on the black tar, sucking up yesterday's heat. This site of death was intensely alive.

Human life, however, continued to be in short supply. My tire tracks from the previous week were the only ones in the sand at the gate. I entered and got to work. The flashlights guided the rake and shovel. I loaded about 600 pounds and was back on the highway at 4 a.m. I reached Albuquerque by seven and unloaded in Santa Fe a few hours later.

Two more trips were needed to remove the bulk of the glass. I did these alone and in darkness. I preferred it. The stress was minimal. I liked the cool night air. Seeing the wild animals in this place recently dedicated to total destruction gave me some hope for the future. It was almost as if they knew something.

A few days after my fourth trip, a telephone call from Santa Fe warned me that my destination in the city was under observation, possibly by federal authorities. The word was out. That ended the Trinitite Project.

About that time, I graduated from Guided Missile School and got my orders to go overseas; radioactive glass became the least of my concerns. There wasn't much left to rake up anyway. As for the stuff I removed, it was buried in 55-gallon drums near Los Alamos, where it belongs.

I still enjoy going to the desert, and exposure to the radioactivity has had no noticeable effect on me, my children, or my grandchildren. When I look at the photos, however, I see someone other than myself. I was never that crazy, I think, even fifty-some years ago. But I'm glad it happened. I wish everyone knew that man's greatest shortcoming is the pride he holds in his weapons, and that instruments of death wouldn't be needed if we all did what we should to get along better.

If we fail to practice international brotherhood, what remains of Trinity Site, this speck of a surface scar, may someday become the most hated place on earth.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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