Mad Cap Socialist Self Analysis! ("Mi Casa") Continues. Part Five: This Is More Than Just a Test

Continuing a piece about my home town, it's odd military history, and my position within.

PREVIOUSLY ON "Mi Casa":
PART ONE: History. A timeline of important dates in this project.
PART TWO: Introductions. In which the players of this one-act socialist analysis first pop up.
PART THREE: Flash Back-Flash Forward. Work on the top-secret project begins.
PART FOUR: Start Your Engines. The people start building the bomb (in more than one place).

GREETER
Back in America, work proceeded on the atomic bomb. Los Alamos was a fortress city and the work was protected with the highest levels of secrecy. Uranium was processed and supplied from a Manhattan Engineer District laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There was only enough uranium to build three bombs. The first was finally tested at Trinity, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945 at 5:29.45 AM. The deadly force of atomic energy was finally on display, in more ways than one. The explosion turned the desert sand into green glass, blasted dust and smoke thousands of feet into the air. People as far as fifty miles from the detonation sight suddenly were bathed in light brighter than sunlight. Some called it, “the day the sun rose twice.”

(Some of the Witnesses to the Bomb appear. JOHN R. LUGO, DOLLY ONSRUD, ROWENA BACA, EVELYN FITE TUNE, WILLIAM WRYE and HELEN WRYE all enter and stand in a line on stage. As each individual speaks, their placard is held up by an actor on the side of the stage. When the individual exits, their placard is dropped.)

JOHN R. LUGO (Placard reads, “U.S. Navy Aviator flying transport plane at 10,000 feet going to West Coast at time of detonation.”)
I saw this tremendous explosion to the south of me, roughly 55 miles from my position. My first impression was, like, the sun coming up in the south. What a ball of fire! It was so bright it lit up the cockpit of the plane. I radioed Albuquerque and got no explanation but was told to not fly south. (Exit.)

DOLLY ONSRUD (Placard reads, “Rancher living roughly 20 miles from Trinity, ground zero of test-site.”)
I woke up, looked out my window and saw a mushroom cloud rising from the other side of the mountains, right where my cattle used to graze before the U.S. Army took over my land three years earlier. They just blew it up. I never got any land returned to me, and I never got compensated for giving up my ranch out of patriotic duty. (Exit.)

ROWENA BACA (Placard reads, “Grandfather José Miera owned the Owl Bar, 35 miles from Trinity site)
The Owl Bar was a popular hangout for the area’s scientists and soldiers. The night of the test, friendly MPs went to my grandfather’s house, woke him up, and told him to stand in the street out front because he was going to see something he had never seen before. The sky suddenly turned red. It illuminated the inside of the house I was in, reflecting red off the walls and ceiling. My grandmother shoved me and my cousin under a bed because she thought it was the end of the world. (Exit.)

EVELYN FITE TUNE (Placard reads, “Lives on ranch 24 miles from Trinity.”)
My husband and I were away in Nevada when the blast went off. No one knew what was going on out there, and of course none of us ever heard of Los Alamos or the atomic bomb. Finally, on the way back we went to a movie house in Denver and watched the newsreel. When they showed the hills around the blast area, my husband said, “Hell, that’s our ranch!” My friends and I visited the test site soon after. We found the hole, we picked up the glass, we climbed the twisted and melted parts of the tower. All those people grew up and married and had kids. Nobody that I know of ever turned up sterile. (Exit.)

WILLIAM WRYE (Placard reads, “Lives in house 20 miles northeast of Trinity.”)
My wife and I were returning from Amarillo the night before the explosion. We got to Bingham and there were eight or ten vehicles and all kinds of lights shining up on the clouds. We were stopped by an MP and a flashing red light. After we told them who we were, they let us go on to the ranch. We were so tired we must have slept right through the blast. Next morning, we were eating breakfast when we saw a couple of soldiers with a little black box out by the stock tank. I went out there and asked what they were doing, and they said they were looking for radioactivity. Well, we had no idea what radioactivity was back then. I told them we didn’t even have the radio on. For four or five days after that, a white substance like flour settled on everything. It got on the posts of the corral and you couldn’t see it real well in the daylight, but at night it would glow. Before long, my whiskers stopped growing. Three or four months later, they came back, but they were white, then later, black. The cattle in the area grew white hair along the side that had been exposed to the blast and half the coat on my black cat turned white. (Exit.)

HELEN WRYE (Placard reads, “Lives in house 20 miles northeast of Trinity.”)
People weren’t afraid of the government then. It was a time of innocence. People were trusting. We had never heard of an atomic bomb. (Exit.)

GREETER
People directly involved with the project also have thoughts to share.

(BERLYN BRIXNER and RAEMER SCHREIBER enter.)

BERLYN BRIXNER (Placard reads, “Chief Photographer of Trinity test.”)
I was to shoot 16-millimeter black-and-white movies from every angle and distance and at every speed. There were bunkers at 10,000 meters or 6.2 miles north, east, south and west from the site. I was stationed at the bunker north of
the test site. I was one of the few people given permission to look directly at the bomb at the time. I had calculated for a ten-sun brightness like the theoretical people told me. When the bomb went off, the whole filter seemed to light up as bright as the sun. I was temporarily blinded. I looked to the side. The Oscura Mountains were as bright as day. I saw this tremendous ball of fire, and it was rising. I was just spellbound! I followed it as it rose. Then it dawned on me. I’m the photographer! I’ve gotta get that ball of fire. There was no sound. It all took place in absolute silence. (Exit.)

GREETER
The bomb proved amazingly effective at destruction. The effects of radiation would soon become known not only to people like William Wrye, but to a much fuller extent for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we flash forward in time for a brief moment, we can hear another inside perspective. This on the effects of radiation for a later bomb test.

RAEMER SCHREIBER (Placard reads, “Head of Core Assembly team for Operation Crossroads in May 1946.”)
Operation Crossroads was a postwar Navy show that destroyed a fleet of surplus warships by two atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. In May, the cores of the bombs for Operation Crossroads were being checked out in a Los Alamos testing lab. Ted Perlman and I were taking readings from the initiators at one side of the room, and Louis Slotin, who assembled the core of the Trinity bomb, was seated at a table twenty feet away with a plutonium assembly. All of a sudden, there was this flash and a clatter and Louis says, “Well, that does it.” He probably knew that he was a dead man. The core sat among a nested set of spheres of beryllium, a neutron reflector. What he did was to lower one of the hemispheres of beryllium over the core sitting in the bottom half and hold it open with a screwdriver. The idea was to lower it down to where there was just a small gap and, if it gets critical, then you could just stop it at that point. You could waggle the screwdriver and make it multiply or quit. But the screwdriver slipped. The thing dropped completely closed, and that made it super critical, prompt critical. It was stopped by the expansion of the core and beryllium, but it was enough to put out a lethal shot of radioactivity. Slotin opened the assembly with his bare hands. It stopped it from sitting there and cooking, which would have been a pretty sad mess. So it got Louis, and it didn’t do Al Graves any good. He was a little farther away. All that happened to him was that he lost his hair. We all got the hell out of there. We went back up around the corner in back of the shielding wall and Slotin and Graves proceeded to write down the events, to make a record of it. Slotin began to get nauseated and a little crazy. We were all taken to the hospital. We were all OK except Slotin, who died in agony nine days later. (Exit.)

END OF PART FIVE. TO BE CONTINUED...

Go to PART SIX: Remember, New Perspective