Reading Ferenc Szasz's "The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945"

Last year, one of my favorite college professors, Ferenc Morton Szasz, passed away:

An "enthusiastic," "prolific" writer, his works such as "The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945" were not only absorbed by academics but proved popular in the public realm. That and other publications, including the 2008 book "Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns: Connected Lives and Legends," left him with international scholarly standing.

..."His training was in social and intellectual history, which is almost a nonexistent field now," Connell-Szasz said. "Because of that, it meant that he was interested in everything in American history - in society, culture, the intellectual world; just common, ordinary, everyday things that included folk history, philosophy, religion, science - you name it."

Dr. Szasz had the most amazing facility to connect storytelling with history. History WAS storytelling, and no one told better stories than he did! His classes were among the most-popular at the University of New Mexico.

Ferenc Szasz was particularly interested in the role of religion in American life, and how it affects everything we do. So, I was very curious what his take on the world's first atomic detonation would be. Visiting the Albuquerque Museum on October 9th, I saw the book for sale and purchased it immediately.

I haven't finished the book yet, but already I'm rather surprised by it. Portions of the Manhattan Project story are quite familiar by now, of course - the basic story has been told many times in a number of ways, including John Adams' fabulous opera "Doctor Atomic" - but Szasz found new angles.

First, how did Trinity site get its name? Szasz sees Hinduism at work.

Second, the unusually prominent role that meteorologists had in the timing of the detonation. This I would not have suspected, since global events, such as President Truman's attendance at the Potsdam summit, were clearly the most-important immediate drivers of the timing, but just behind those global imperatives, meteorologists were hard at work trying to work out the local imperatives; specifically, how the intrusion of a tropical air mass into New Mexico in mid-July altered the forecast for radioactive fallout.

Third, the deleterious effects of radioactive fallout were more a concern than I would have expected, given people's inexperience with it at the time. They knew enough to be quite frightened. They created 'Jumbo', a large iron vessel to capture flying plutonium in the event of a misfire, but which would have vaporized (and added immensely to the radioactive fallout) had it been used (which, fortunately, it wasn't).

Over the next week, I will post a few selections from the book. Two selections for today:

Why all this activity should have been labeled Trinity is a bit of a puzzle. Indeed, Trinity still seems a strange, almost blasphemous, term for such a spot. There is, moreover, no agreement on how the site received its name.

In 1982, Robert W. Henderson maintained that Colonel Lex Stevens named it. According to Henderson, he and Stevens were at the site surveying the best way to haul Jumbo from the railway siding to Ground Zero. A devout Roman Catholic, Stevens observed that the siding was "Pope's Siding." He remarked that the Pope had a special access to the Trinity, and that the scientists would need all the help they could get to move Jumbo to its proper spot. From this, the name Trinity gradually became common parlance.

A more common version suggests that J. Robert Oppenheimer selected the name, but there is no agreement as to what he had in mind when he chose it. He, himself, never said. Physicist Robert Jungk thought that Trinity was taken from an old abandoned turquoise mine located in the region. Others have suggested it was connected with the fact that three bombs - the "unholy trinity" - were under construction at the same time. Reporter Lansing Lamont has argued that just before Oppenheimer was asked for a name, he had been relaxing by reading a John Donne poem: "Batter my heart, three person'd God; for you/ As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend..." Lamont claimed that Oppenheimer chose the name from this.

Assuming that Oppenheimer did choose the name, these theories are still unlikely. In 1974, historian Marjorie Bell Chambers offered the most probable explanation. She suggested that Oppenheimer's choice of Trinity referred not to the Christian understanding of the term but to the Hindu connotation of it. Oppenheimer's religious background, of course, was Jewish, and his early schooling came from Felix Adler's Ethical Culture School in New York City. Since he had taught himself Sanskrit for pleasure, Oppenheimer was well conversant with Hindu culture. The Hindu concept of Trinity consists of Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Shiva, the Destroyer. For Hindus, whatever exists in the universe is never destroyed. It is simply transformed. The cycle of life is such that if one part dies, another is created from it. It was in this sense, Chambers noted, that Oppenheimer chose the word Trinity.

Also:

At one time, eight different site locations were under consideration: the Tularosa, New Mexico basin; the Jornada del Muerto region of central New Mexico; a desert training area near Rice, California; an island off the coast of southern California; the desert region south of Grants, New Mexico, near the malpais; the area southwest of Cuba, New Mexico and north of Thoreaux; the barrier sand reef off the coast of south Texas; and the San Luis Valley region of southern Colorado.

The choice soon narrowed down to three: the malpais region near Grants, New Mexico; the desert training area north of Rice, California; and the Jornada. The first two, however, presented problems. The malpais lay close to Los Alamos, but the region was difficult to cross. Engineers feared they would have to blast out large sections of the ancient lava beds to provide enough roads. They were also concerned about potential difficulties in hauling Jumbo over the lava. The California desert area could accomodate Jumbo without difficulty, but it lay too far from Los Alamos for easy travel. Moreover, it was soon discovered that General Gorge Patton had been using it as a training ground for his Africa Corps troops. Groves once termed Patton "the most disagreeable man I ever met" and absolutely refused even to talk to him about the area. This left the Jornada.