![]() Nearly eight decades later, that industry is falling into disrepair. “This is building an entirely new industry from scratch in two and a half years.” 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. Most had no idea what they were helping to build.Ī shift change shows a crowd of smiling female workers leaving the uranium enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1944.Ī shift change at the uranium enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1944. The Manhattan Project employed nearly 1 percent of the American civilian workforce, toiling everywhere from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to the Pacific Northwest to the sandy wastes of New Mexico. The United States wasn’t just building a bomb. 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 wind blew much of the nuclear fallout toward sparsely inhabited communities in the New Mexico desert. ![]() The blinding flash of the detonation-which was only revealed to the public later-was visible for almost 200 miles. Robert Oppenheimer remembered in an interview for a television documentary in 1965. ![]() “We knew the world would not be the same,” J. 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. NEAR SOCORRO, New Mexico-There isn’t much left on the oppressive white sands of the New Mexico desert to mark that the nuclear age began here.
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