There are two distinct histories of the site. One is fixed at 5:29:45 a.m. MWT (Mountain War Time) on July 16, 1945, when the test device fissioned and exploded. Device is a thin word for a bomb five feet in diameter, weighing 2.65 tons, covered in 32 “lenses” made of two different types of explosives, which squeezed the plutonium core, starting an atomic reaction. Many timelines and geographies collapse in this moment, which stretches forward to include the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, and Nagasaki on August 9, then the Japanese surrender on August 14, and stretches back to include three years of the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime effort that proliferated through dozens of spaces in London, Montréal, and the United States, including the two important sites in New Mexico: Los Alamos (or “Site Y”), where physicists, chemists, and engineers worked on the theoretical and practical aspects of making nuclear bombs; and the Trinity Site, where those theories were tested in an open-air laboratory. 5 This history, that moment, is visualized in a series of photographs that show a blister rising from the ground, images shot at 10,000 frames per second at a distance of 800 yards, in a steel-and-glass bunker, by Fastex cameras later pulled from the irradiated wreckage by a chain attached to a lead-lined tank. 6
The timestamp itself is a fabrication. “War Time” had just been invented, and radio communication was cut off before the time of the blast could be confirmed. Yet history records the positions of the men who authored the moment: Oppenheimer, the director of Site Y, George B. Kistiakowsky, head of the Explosives Division, and Bainbridge, director of the Trinity test, in a control shelter 10,000 yards south of Ground Zero; and the other scientists 20 miles northwest, on Campañia Hill, their faces smeared with sunscreen, wearing heavy gloves, peering through pieces of welder’s glass. 7 In some versions of this history, Oppenheimer lies on the ground, just outside the control shelter. It was July 16 — it had to be that day, even though the winds were not good — because Truman was headed to the Potsdam conference with Churchill and Stalin. The visible faces of this history are the faces of famous men.
The other history of the Trinity Site is nothing like this. It understands the blast not as a moment, but as a continuous present and future, unfolding over time and through bodies. The first language of this history is a question: what happened, did the sun blow up? This history has no famous images. Its faces belong to ordinary people living ordinary lives until the inconceivable occurs.