Disaster Triumphant

Visiting Trinity Site, location of the Manhattan Project, Christopher Kempf is stunned by the failures of the American curatorial imagination.

By Christopher KempfDecember 12, 2024

• Science & Technology

• History

There is no form of being in the world that science could not penetrate, but what can be penetrated by science is not being.
—Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944

EIGHT DECADES AFTER it was shuttered, the Manhattan Project survives in the American cultural imagination mostly as a series of set pieces: Einstein writing FDR from his vacation home on Long Island, Fermi stacking graphite beneath the University of Chicago football field, Oppenheimer reciting the Bhagavad Gītā. Usually depicted as a civic or existential inheritance, as in Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer, such set pieces contextualize and lend “human interest” to the canonical recordings we have all seen of nuclear test explosions in the New Mexico desert. In those recordings, cacti, telephone poles, and model houses are blown to splinters again and again in government grayscale.

Most remarkable, however, in the actual moments of explosion in July 1945, were the colors.

To eyewitnesses of the first nuclear detonation at Trinity Site, and obscured both in strike-a-pose historiography and on Fastax celluloid, the color palette of plutonium fission “beggared description,” as one observer put it, shifting along visible and invisible spectrums as it expanded skyward. “It was like being at the bottom of an ocean of light,” wrote physicist Joan Hinton. “Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up.” “Up it went,” recalled William L. Laurence in The New York Times, “changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it was expanding.” For a moment, Laurence went on, “the color was unearthly green, [like] the corona of the sun during a total eclipse.” As they watched through pieces of welder’s glass, uncertain whether the blast would ignite the atmosphere itself, as early calculations had predicted, observers regarded the explosion as an aesthetic experience, the kind of “beauty,” in the words of Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, which “the great poets dream about.” From a low ridge east of Base Camp, Austrian physicist Victor Weisskopf watched “a blue halo surrounding the yellow and orange sphere,” recalling “in spite of an inner resistance to such an analogy” the 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece, in which an incandescent Christ rises toward the stars within an orange and blue nimbus. In turn, physicist Warren Nyer imagined the explosion as “a living thing with a blue glow,” the nearby Oscura Mountains illuminated “like paintings of someone on the moon.”

The effect, if not the devastation, was to repeat itself the morning I drove down from Albuquerque. Outside the site’s Stallion Gate, where a half-mile line of cars idled on the shoulder, the Oscuras loomed black-on-black in the early darkness, their buttes and crags irradiated now and then by a flickering low-altitude light, which I mistook at first—like Thomas Hardy’s churchyard dead, confusing “gunnery practice out at sea” with the detonations of Judgment Day—for test-fire at the adjacent White Sands Missile Range. In fact, the illumination was heat lightning, and the poem for which Oppenheimer had named Trinity Site was not Hardy’s “Channel Firing” (1914) but John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV” (1633), in which the former Dean at St. Paul’s implores his Creator, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”

Preeminent among the “Big Three” in American nuclear tourism, Trinity opens to the public only once per year, on the third Saturday in October. By the time the sun rose, therefore, an orange, acid-drop flare on the horizon, the line of cars waiting to enter stretched six miles north to Highway 380, headlights winding in brilliant chiaroscuro through the scrub and sagebrush of the Tularosa Basin. Slowly, that landscape, too, resolved into color, into the flat indigos and layered buffs of the American desert at dawn. To the Spanish of the 17th century, daunted by its austerity, the region had been known as the Jornada del Muerto. To me, what seemed unbearable was not the austerity but what I saw when I glanced behind me in the rear-view: the line of hulking tour buses and Boy Scout vans, and imagining myself crammed in one of them.

A great deal of Trinity Site, as it happens, evokes the tedium of the fourth-grade field trip. Beneath a blue tent next to the parking lot, a group of volunteers swept Geiger counters across a set of artifacts recovered after the bombing, the unmistakable “click, click, click” provoking in its increasing urgency titters of delight and mock terror from onlookers. At a table along the chain-link fence, National Park Service (NPS) historians chatted with visitors, their Day-Glo vests and “Free Answers” banner seeming to promise some kind of cabalistic divination. At the hypocenter itself, marked by a 12-foot lava-rock obelisk, visitors snapped selfies with their loved ones, milling with vague interest past “interpretive displays” that amounted to little more than yellowing photos and newspaper cutouts shellacked onto plywood. There was nothing among the science project–like displays, moreover, that one would not have encountered elsewhere in researching the site, in the hundreds of monographs and amateur websites devoted to the Manhattan Project and to Trinity in particular: scientists lined up at the Base Camp mess hall, the mushroom cloud at successive stages in its tumescence. The entire enterprise gave off, with what seemed to me Geiger-activating intensity, an aura of the desultory, of the ad hoc and orderless. I found myself wondering why anyone, notwithstanding the power of a bronze marker to make a place, would ever come here.

Curated by the NPS and White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), the interpretative displays at Trinity articulate its history as a conjunction of science-triumphalism and nostalgic nationalism, its physicists and GIs working side by side in dispassionate pursuit of strictly technical expertise. “The true responsibility of a scientist,” as Oppenheimer put it, “is to the integrity and vigor of his science,” attributing to scientists’ work “the kind of beauty that is inseparable from craftsmanship and form” as well as “the vigor that we rightly associate with the simple, ordered lives of artisans or of farmers.” Which is to say—one encounters nothing at all controversial at Trinity. Just as the existence of slavery has been elided on the monuments along West Confederate Avenue at Gettysburg, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki, nor the annihilating effects of a nuclear detonation on the human body—“Their skin had peeled off,” described survivor Shigeko Matsumoto, “and hung limply down on the ground, in ribbons”—appears in either textual or photographic form here, where, per the historical materials made available, American men proved their resourcefulness under the most formidable of circumstances.

That narrative, a rhetorical set piece as prevalent at Trinity Site as its hazard warnings, reprises the moral evasiveness of those physicists who built the bomb, who not only conceived of their work, as Oppenheimer’s language suggests, as a matter of neutron backgrounds and beryllium ratios but also managed at the same time to bracket their constitutive intimacy with contractors like DuPont and Union Carbide, as well as with the US Army Corps of Engineers. Such self-exemption turned on the specious yet reassuring notion that “theoretical” could be sifted out, as in the revolutions of a centrifuge, from so-called “applied” physics. Content to accept unprecedented government underwriting, only after the fact did Oppenheimer and his colleagues find their way to the existential unease for which President Harry Truman—in a moment of accountability and moral clarity, as Nolan indeed frames it in Oppenheimer—denounced the newly conscientious physicist as a “crybaby.” Even as Manhattan Project veterans fine-tuned their après-moi-le-déluge sermonizing, moreover, they continued to advocate for “technical superiority” as a “deterrent to aggression.” “We want to keep the initiative,” Oppenheimer advised, adumbrating a moral calculus as elaborate and as internally inconsistent, it would seem, as a fallacious proof.

Just as suspect, though, in the postwar pietism among nuclear physicists was their insistence that science itself remained a benevolent influence, a notion propounded without irony and for which Oppenheimer, the “No. 1 Thinker on Atomic Energy,” as the cover of Life proclaimed him in 1949, became the principal spokesperson. Science “will improve man’s health [and] ease his labor,” he had announced two years earlier at MIT:

[It] will shorten his working day and take away the most burdensome part of his effort, which will enable him to communicate, to travel, and to have a wider choice both in the general question of how he is to spend his life, and in the specific question of how he is to spend an hour of his leisure.

Though no self-respecting scientist undertook his work for material or utilitarian ends, explained Oppenheimer, the discipline nonetheless “pays for itself again and again,” as it had, one imagines, when Genghis Khan first used gunpowder against the Chinese and when, confronted with the horrors of trench warfare, German scientists developed launchable canisters of chlorine.

Such ethical entanglements—quantum, perhaps, in their intricacy—seemed that morning to have eluded the curatorial ambit of the NPS and WSMR, entities no more capable of addressing the ambiguities of the Manhattan Project, as I came to recognize, than of imparting on visitors the magnificent and dread sublimity of that first test detonation. Indeed, its custodians seemed to have envisioned Trinity Site less as an occasion for ethical reckoning than as an object lesson in the particular American genius for transforming solemnity and pathos into kitsch. At a foldout table a mere 15 feet from the hypocenter, an enterprise referring to itself as Trinity Site Resale pushed trademarked shot glasses for seven dollars and bumper stickers for three, each screen-printed with a hazard warning and cartoon mushroom cloud. The wi-fi network, powered by Wacker Neuson generators, had been named “Trinity,” its password set to “atombomb.” At a tent near the parking lot, WSMR employees sold coffee and donuts along with something called a “Sonoran Hot Dog” for nine dollars; dozens of porta-potties had been set up along a nearby fence to handle the aftereffects. Post-Oppenheimer, both the refreshment stand and the bathrooms did brisk business, attended by indistinguishable boomer men who, apropos of nothing, would explain to one another, in what seemed to me panic-inducing brinkmanship, how high-explosive lenses turned a plutonium core supercritical, for instance, or how Soviet spies had used the Castillo Street Bridge in Santa Fe as a dead drop.

One encounters the type, of course, at virtually any site to have figured—however negligibly—in American history, though I had been wrong, as I began to understand, to have expected at Trinity the reverence or sense of moment that had so moved me, for instance, during the two years I lived in Gettysburg, where Northerners and Southerners alike tour the battlefield with hat-in-hand solemnity. That landscape, admittedly, is a more majestic one, those events more fathomable, I suspect, for the human scale of their horror and heroism. Or perhaps that battle has become distant enough in its difference to elicit the awe and remorse I found so lacking that morning. Though the Civil War has acquired new relevance in the schisms of our own cultural moment, its armies relied notoriously and with devastating consequences on tactics from a century prior. Nor had science itself, in the form of battlefield medicine, advanced much farther than bloodletting and miasma theory. Not until 1867 would Joseph Lister publish on antisepsis. Until 1887 we still believed in “the ether.”

Admittedly, when I came out to Trinity, I had been disposed to bristle at its scientistic slant, having the week prior endured an annual meeting of the faculty at the University of Illinois, where I teach. Amid encomiums to “trapped atom quantum computing” and “XUV diffraction gratings”—and following veritable convulsions over a $10 million donation to the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science—neither the president nor the chancellor could summon the professional wherewithal to mention in any capacity the arts or humanities. Likewise, I have acceded in middle age to the conviction that the only sensical attitude to a world made over by monopoly capitalism is contempt. If “science” has extended the average lifespan, for instance, it is only to dragoon its beneficiaries into corporate managed-care facilities where, neither “assisted” nor quite “living,” they can be bled both financially and pharmaceutically. If artificial intelligence will allow Americans “wider choice” in Oppenheimer’s “question of how [they are] to spend [their] life,” it is because, as Elon Musk echoed in May 2024, “probably none of us will have a job.” And if media technologies have suggested how we might “spend an hour of [our] leisure,” it is with Hannity and Candy Crush, and with their palliation of a citizenry so intellectually impoverished, it has become apparent, as to accept as grandest gospel those fantasies hawked it by right-wing demagogues; when a society prostrates itself at the altar of STEM education, among other idols, it might hardly wonder why its populace can no longer distinguish between reality and misinformation.

Though neither Oppenheimer nor his associates, memorialized like war heroes at Trinity, seem quite to have appreciated the implications of their work, two of their most influential contemporaries perceived clearly—and railed against—the dangers inherent in “applied” or instrumentalized science. Writing from Malibu in 1944, where they had fled following the Nazi takeover, German émigrés Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer cautioned that “in the present collapse of bourgeois civilization not only the pursuit but the meaning of science has become problematical,” tracing its faults to an “indefatigable self-destructiveness” in the epistemological project of “enlightenment.” For Adorno and Horkheimer, masterful in their brandishing of the mic-drop indignity, a “technological rationale is the rationale of domination.” Or, “enlightenment is totalitarian.” Or—an assessment especially appropriate in the context of Trinity Site—“the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” It had been possible, in other words, for them not only to anticipate the devastation implicit in a race for nuclear supremacy but also to imagine the so-called “American Century” that followed as one long and lamentable doom-scroll.

While they never visited Trinity Site, Adorno and Horkheimer would have recognized there, and perhaps appreciated—fond as they were of the California suntan and of Saturday joyrides out through the Inland Empire—those grim ironies attending its curation. Its activity stations and tchotchke vendors may have lent Trinity the gravity of a field trip and flea market, but its ubiquitous “Now Hiring” placards reimagined the site, in turn, as nothing so supernal as a job fair, as US Army recruiters tempted “STEM professionals,” as their glossy brochures referred to them, with tuition reimbursement, paid overtime, and matching 401(k) accounts. How, I wondered, dodging the soldiers’ eye contact, could this be Trinity Site? And how could these institutions, embodiments of administrative sterility, have ever addressed the ethical or aesthetic resonances of an event of such consequence and color—“it was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue,” Farrell recalled, and “lighted every peak”—that it conjured for eyewitnesses “forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty”?

Incapable, as a discipline, of addressing the existential questions it provokes and imagining even its own history as one of benightedness and naivete, shrouded in the pall of ignorance, scientific inquiry rationalizes in the name of “progress” any endeavor to which it might be applied. Those rationalizations come thick at Trinity Site, where the Boy Scouts and tour groups learn from the Bhagavad Gītā, by way of Oppenheimer, that “in the depths of shame, the good deeds a man has done before defend him,” and from a slickly produced publicity pamphlet, conspicuous in its elisions, that “the mission of White Sands Missile Range begins with a customer” and “ends when […] a data report has been delivered.” An invasion of Japan, as one sign points out, would have entailed half a million American casualties and twice as many Japanese, to the prevention of which, in their beneficence, Manhattan Project physicists had devoted themselves.

Having insisted on an unconditional surrender, the United States achieved that submission, and guaranteed its postwar supremacy, through relentless application of its military and scientific prowess. That is one interpretation, in any case, of American history.

In another, Robert E. Lee signs terms at a marble-topped table in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s house in Appomattox. His soldiers, as those terms stipulate, will be pardoned so long as they relinquish their weapons. “[E]ach officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes,” Ulysses S. Grant writes, appending under separate order the proviso that Lee’s men might bring with them their mules and horses. They will need them, Grant acknowledges, for the spring planting.

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Featured image: Photo 4: The Trinity Test, 1945. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education, National Park Service. CC0, nps.gov. Accessed December 5, 2024. Image has been cropped.