On Sunday, July 15, 1945, at around 11 pm Mountain War Time, New York Times reporter and in-house Manhattan Project historian (or propagandist, some would say) William L. Laurence joined the project’s scientists on a caravan of buses, trucks, and cars heading out of Albuquerque. Their destination: the New Mexico desert, about 125 miles to the southeast, to witness the first atomic bomb detonation in history. None of the bomb’s creators knew whether the test—codenamed “Trinity”—would be successful. One of the scientists even speculated that the blast could ignite the nitrogen in the earth’s atmosphere and end human civilization.
When the caravan reached its destination—the Alamogordo Bombing Range in the desert basin known as the Jornada del Muerto (translated into English “dead’s man’s journey”)—the night sky was dark with black clouds, Laurence later recalled, except for an occasional, foreboding bolt of lightning. The group was given strict instructions about what to do when the bomb went off: Lie prone on the ground, face down, head facing away from ground zero. Do not look at the bomb’s flash directly. Stay on the ground until the blast wave passed. Someone produced a bottle of sunscreen, and the scientists passed it around, rubbing it into their faces and arms in the dark.
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