How Oppenheimer's first nuclear test changed world — forever

The authors of the latest think piece featured by Foreign Policy ponder on the game of nuclear brinkmanship unfolding in today's world. Caliber.Az reprints this article.

There isn’t much left on the oppressive white sands of the New Mexico desert to mark that the nuclear age began here. On a wind-swept patch of land so barren that Spanish conquistadors, hailing from the sunbaked hellscape of Extremadura, once called the trek “the journey of death,” a lava-rock obelisk is the only thing marking the nearly 25-kiloton Trinity explosion that ignited the nuclear age.

“We knew the world would not be the same,” J. Robert Oppenheimer remembered in an interview for a television documentary in 1965. The blinding flash of the detonation—which was only revealed to the public later—was visible for almost 200 miles. 

The wind blew much of the nuclear fallout toward sparsely inhabited communities in the New Mexico desert. The only reason the Trinity test did not irradiate 100,000 people was because of a shift in the wind: One wrong gust, and radioactive dust would have blanketed Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

The United States wasn’t just building a bomb. The Manhattan Project employed nearly 1 per cent of the American civilian workforce, toiling everywhere from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to the Pacific Northwest to the sandy wastes of New Mexico. Most had no idea what they were helping to build.

A shift change at the uranium enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1944. 

“This is not a little tiny project. This is not even a weapons project in the traditional sense,” said Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology and an expert on nuclear secrecy. “This is building an entirely new industry from scratch in two and a half years.”

Nearly eight decades later, that industry is falling into disrepair. Over half of America’s nuclear infrastructure is more than four decades old, and a quarter of it dates back to the Manhattan Project itself, according to the Pentagon.

The United States lost its monopoly on the bomb before the end of 1940s, and nuclear weapons have gotten exponentially more destructive. Russia claims just two “Satan II” intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) can destroy the entire east coast of the United States; the US-made Ohio-class submarine, which the US Navy will be phasing out as Columbia-class hulls slip their ways, was originally designed to destroy multiple Soviet cities at once.

The Biden administration insists it is not in an arms race with Russia and China. But the US administration’s more than $1 trillion modernisation of the nuclear triad that will see the United States field new fleets of nuclear-capable stealth bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarines has split American politics into warring camps. There are progressives who believe the Pentagon is tempting nuclear Armageddon and should dismantle the triad entirely. There are also hawks who believe the United States is too fearful of Russian nuclear sabre-rattling.

“Disarmament is not something that’s feasible in the short term,” said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank. “In fact, we might be, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, looking at a world where nuclear weapons begin to increase in great numbers around the world.”

For Oppenheimer and the core team of 250 staff at the site, everything was riding on the Trinity test. They would only have one chance to make sure that history’s deadliest weapon actually worked as advertised.

In the seconds after the “Gadget” bomb dropped from the top of a 100-foot tower to the ground in the New Mexico desert, two circling B-29 Superfortress bombers saw the Sacramento Mountains illuminated with a radiance brighter than daylight. The roar of the shock was felt 100 miles away and the sight of the blast carried even farther; the fireball from the explosion reached seven miles high. And thousands of pieces of trinitite, a mix of quartz rock and feldspar melted into an emerald green glass by the heat of the blast, were scattered along what was then the White Sands Proving Grounds.

Not only were Oppenheimer and his team convinced that the bomb, packed with 13 pounds of plutonium, had worked, but they were also convinced no one was in range of the fallout. The only nearby town was Socorro (an oft-used Spanish word for “help”), 35 miles away.

Tina Cordova is a sixth-generation New Mexican, hailing from a village of nearly 3,000 people an hour’s drive downwind from the Trinity site. It’s a community that has been fighting for decades to get recognition from the United States government about the Trinity test and compensation for millions of dollars—perhaps billions—in medical bills as locals have battled radiation-induced cancers for generations, stemming from the first nuclear test in New Mexico and dozens more above-ground tests in Nevada.

The bomb went off in the middle of a rural community, where many people were getting their water from ditches and cisterns, their meat and dairy from cattle and chicken coops outside. Thousands of people lived within a 50-mile radius of the blast site.

Cordova’s grandmother, who was only a little girl at the time of the Trinity test, was shocked out of bed. Her mother gathered her family up and prayed the rosary. For days, wet bed sheets that had been placed outside to bring a cool breeze inside were covered in layers of ash. People would rinse them off, and then rinse them off again. The heat of the explosion was so intense it burned the hide off of cows in nearby fields, Cordova said.

“It’s absolutely inhumane what we go through here,” said Cordova, who is a radioactive cancer survivor, a disease that has passed through generations of her family. “Dealing with the idea that we were collateral damage to our government’s pursuit of nuclear superiority.”

Cordova and the thousands of New Mexicans seeking restitution for radioactive illnesses and the 1,030 nuclear tests conducted by the United States between 1945 and 1992 form one of the major tentpoles in the American nuclear debate.

It has pitted grassroots campaigners, Catholic priests, and dovish politicians who believe the US nuclear arsenal exceeds any reasonable degree of security for a country that can’t or won’t tackle poverty or gun violence against US officials and lawmakers who see nuclear weapons as a deterrent against Russia and China. But big bombs also bring big dollars—into their districts.

The nuclear enterprise is now intermingled in US communities, growing from the skeletal structure of the Manhattan Project. Today, in South Carolina, just miles from the Georgia border, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has been pushing for successive US administrations to restart the facility at the Savannah River Site—a onetime prolific producer of weapons-grade plutonium—to convert the existing facility into a production centre for commercial nuclear fuel.

In Oak Ridge, just 20 miles outside of Knoxville, where Gen. Leslie Groves first ordered a facility built to enrich uranium for the atomic bomb, a large national laboratory still produces uranium-235, one of the two radioactive isotopes produced by the Manhattan Project. And a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which Oppenheimer once led, is one of the plushest gigs available in New Mexico, one of America’s poorest states.

A mix of ephemera from the 1950s related to the U.S. atomic bomb program and Cold War-era fears.

The Manhattan Project officially ended after the end of World War II, but it helped establish the United States Atomic Energy Commission, which heralded an era of mass weapons production during the Cold War. The number of US warheads peaked in the 1960s, before the US gradually reduced its stockpile over the following two decades owing to new arms control deals, even as tensions with the Soviet Union escalated.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a new question emerged: how to rethink the use and production of nuclear weapons. And the answer to that was nuclear modernization.

“This [nuclear modernisation] has been a multi-decade, multi-president process, and in some ways, remarkably bipartisan,” Wellerstein said. “It’s a hugely expensive, multitrillion-dollar program that’s been sort of a juggernaut moving along for the last few decades.”

A deactivated Minuteman missile stands on display at a park in Lewistown, Montana, on April 8, 2022. 

Across three US Air Force bases in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, the United States has 400 nuclear-tipped Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles on around-the-clock alert (American ICBMs have been on that alert status nonstop for 63 years.). Those Ohio-class submarines that can destroy the capital of any country in the United Nations?

They flank the Pacific and Atlantic coasts in Washington and Georgia, their nearly 600-foot, four-deck hulls constructed in Rhode Island and assembled in Groton, Connecticut. The 1950s-era B-52, which is now being flown by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of its first pilots, will serve until the 2050s.

On paper, that looks like an insurmountable edge. The United States and Russia, combined, have 89 per cent of the world’s inventory of nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists, though the American stockpile has been drifting slowly downward as it retires about one-third of its outdated arsenal.

China could be catching up. The Pentagon believes that Beijing assembled 400 warheads in just a fraction of the time that it took the United States to build a nuclear arsenal of that size, and if it continues at the same pace for the next dozen years, China could have 1,500 nuclear warheads ready to launch.

“They still refer to China as ‘Red China.’ They still refer to them as godless communists and still think that this is like a Cold War battle between good capitalism and bad communism,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a senior advisor at Global Zero and a former National Security Council advisor during the Obama administration. “The mindset inside the US nuclear security community is very much of the Cold War mentality.”

A visitor looks at an informational display at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in Philip, South Dakota, on Sept. 29, 2016.

The Biden administration was nervous. For more than a year, the Ukrainian military had held out against a superior, nuclear-armed Russian foe in the face of overwhelming odds. But last month, with Russia rattling its nuclear sabres so hard the rust almost came off, US officials wanted to calm the tensions.

As National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan approached the stage at one of Washington’s largest disarmament conferences in June, the US administration faced a changed world even from the year before. Russian President Vladimir Putin had suspended participation in the New START accord. Ukraine was warning that Russia had designs to blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest such facility, on Russian-occupied soil in Ukraine. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had moved the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to Armageddon it had ever been.

But the US administration insisted it was not in an arms race.

“[T]he United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them,” Sullivan told the crowd. “We’ve learned that lesson.” The message from the Biden administration was clear: Both Russia and China had an open invite to rejoin disarmament talks.

It’s far from an anti-nuclear stance, given that the Biden administration has paired the hope for disarmament talks with a buildup of more modern weapons. But they see it in another light: reducing risk of a destructive war. “One of the reasons we use the phrase ‘risk reduction’ is because the nuclear states don’t want to eliminate risk,” said Panda, the Carnegie expert. “If you eliminate the risk that nuclear weapons could be used, you don’t have nuclear deterrence.”

Even if the Biden administration doesn’t want an arms race, it may already have one on its hands. The United States delayed tests of the upgraded Minuteman ICBM before finally conducting them last year, prompting jeers from former US officials and Republican members of Congress, who think that the administration has been too cautious about the threat of Russian nuclear escalation.

“The risk of escalation is not zero, but yet it’s not high,” said Marshall Billingslea, the former top US nuclear arms negotiator during the Trump administration and now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “It increases the more weakness that you telegraph to the Russians.”

For others, the game of nuclear brinkmanship is too much of a gamble. Take it from Sharon Weiner, an American University professor who for the past two years ran the Nuclear Biscuit, a virtual reality experiment that allowed participants to don a headset putting them in the situation room as the president of the United States amid a response to a nuclear threat.

Realistically, the president would have 15 minutes or less to make a choice—and depending on how quickly they get to you, that clock might tick a whole lot faster. “The posture of US ICBMs means any decision has to be made quickly, if you’re going to use them,” Weiner said.

Even though people who tried out the simulation were surrounded by a table of virtual advisors on call, Weiner found that her subjects often chose, and quickly, to use nuclear weapons. “It’s all about perception and lack of trust,” she added. “We have too much investment in nuclear weapons as a solution to problems as opposed to a creator of problems.”

A man wears a jacket that depicts a WWII plane releasing bombs as he tours the Trinity nuclear testing site at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on April 1, 2000.

When a nuclear weapon goes off, the radioactive core heats up to thousands—and then millions—of degrees Celsius. While the weapon is cooking into superheated plasma from the heat of the explosion, the energy from the reaction gives off soft X-rays, shocking particles of air in front of them with so much energy that they light on fire. In scientific terms, that is the beginning of a nuclear fireball.

After that, the impacts of a nuclear explosion are almost unpredictable, even with a room full of supercomputers crunching away data from more than 2,000 nuclear tests that have been conducted by the United States and other major powers since 1945. At the dawn of the nuclear age, the predictions were so divergent about the fallout from atmospheric tests that the 1954 Castle Bravo explosion, on Bikini Atoll, blanketed 7,000 miles with radioactive debris.

“The problems are so hard that even with a modern supercomputer, they’re only kind of tractable, and maybe not even that much,” said Edward Geist, a policy researcher at the Rand Corporation.

But scientists have been able to model what the aftermath of a nuclear war might look like. In a room full of reporters at the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque, Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University, often clad in sandals and tie-dyed shirts, explained what the planet might look like.

“It might look like this,” he said, pointing to a cloud of smoke covering the northern hemisphere that would likely shift to the southern hemisphere and block out the sun. “If there’s enough smoke, temperatures would get below freezing. We call that nuclear winter. It would get cold, dark, and dry.” Crops and cattle would wither and die with hundreds of millions of tons of soot in the air from industrial fires. Global caloric production might drop as much as 90 per cent. And however many people died in nuclear explosions, 5 billion more could die from an ensuing famine.

“The current nuclear arsenal can produce nuclear winter,” Robock said. “And nuclear winter can kill most of humanity."