Back to Alamogordo.
The army leased a ranch in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto site and converted it into a military police station and field laboratory.
They thoroughly vacuumed it to make a makeshift clean room and sealed its windows with black electrical tape.
Just like Ray’s infamous kill room.
Nearly 2 miles to the northwest, they marked out the spot for Ground Zero.
Three concrete-roofed observation bunkers with bullet-proof glass portholes were dug 10,000 yards north, west and south of Ground Zero.
From there, the test would be controlled and the explosion would be filmed and measured.
Scientists wanted to determine the symmetry of the implosion and the amount of energy released.
They also wanted to get estimates of the damage that the bomb would cause and study the behaviour of the resulting fireball.
The biggest concern was the radioactivity the test device would release.
It was hoped that favourable meteorological conditions would carry the radioactivity into the upper atmosphere.
As they were proposing to do the test in the middle of the thunderstorm season, the army stood ready to evacuate the people in surrounding areas.
Two towers were built.
One was 800 yards south of Ground Zero.
Made of heavy wooden beams, it was 20 feet high, topped with a broad platform like an outdoor dance floor.
One day, the contractors returned to find that it had disappeared.
Harvard physics professor Kenneth T. Bainbridge, recruited from MIT’s radar project, the man in charge of Project Trinity, had loaded the platform with canisters of radioactive waste from Hanford and surrounded it with 100 tons of high explosives.
Before dawn on 7 May, he detonated the largest chemical explosion ever set off to test the instruments and procedures in a practice firing.
The tower at Ground Zero had been prefabricated in steel and was shipped in sections to the Trinity site, where concrete footings had been sunk 20 feet into the rocky desert floor.
The four feet were 35 feet apart and the tower rose 100 feet above the ground.
Near the top was a platform with a removable centre section and corrugated iron sheets on three sides.
The open side faced the camera bunker to the west.
Above the platform was a $20,000 electrically driven heavy-duty winch.
On 12 July, the plutonium core was taken to the test area in an army sedan.
The non-nuclear components of the bomb left for the test site at 12:01 am on Friday the 13th.
The idea was to put a ‘reverse English’ on the ill-luck of that day.
‘reverse English’ - Billiards. a spinning motion imparted to a cue ball in such a manner as to prevent it from moving in a certain direction.
As they rode through Santa Fe in the small hours, the convoy sounded a siren.
At midnight because the army did not want to risk some late-night drunken driver speeding out of a side street into a truck full of high explosives.
Final assembly of "the gadget" - which was its nickname - took place in the ranch house.
Before it began, one of the physcists, Robert Bacher, asked for a receipt from the army.
As Los Alamos was technically part of the University of California, he didn't want the university to be liable for the several million dollars-worth of plutonium they were about to vaporize.
Imagine that conversation - so…. Where’s our plutonium? Ummm we blew it up. You WHAT? That’ll be $2 billion, bucko.
Then the team installed the neutron initiator that would trigger the explosion between the two hemispheres of plutonium.
These were hot to the touch due to the alpha particles they were already giving off.
HOT JAMES BROWN (Bowie FAME riff, Carlos Alomar)
The plutonium ball was then placed inside a cylinder of U-238 tamper.
The core wa
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
