<\/p>\n
Refueling 16-wheelers, a cloudless blue sky and an asphalt parking lot that blurs into the brown scrub beyond the intersection of two highways: If you\u2019re headed north from White Sands National Monument up to Santa Fe, as we were, you\u2019ll hit the Clines Corners rest stop.<\/p>\n
For a hundred miles, billboards prime you: \u201cSouvenirs,\u201d \u201cIndian Pottery,\u201d \u201cFireworks,\u201d \u201c99-cent Coffee.\u201d At the junction of Interstate 40 and U.S. Route 285, the iconic gas-station-diner-gift shop is an oasis of respite and kitsch. \u201cWorth stopping for since 1934,\u201d the signs say. We needed gas, coffee, restrooms, a chance to stretch our legs. It was Black Friday.<\/p>\n
The gift shop is the size of a warehouse. Its walls and aisles are bursting: hundreds of hot pink and neon-green dreamcatchers, Minnetonka moccasins, \u201cI Want to Believe\u201d posters from the X-files, \u201cZuni jewelry,\u201d Mexican blankets woven in every imaginable color, T-shirts, bumper stickers declaring: \u201cPolice Lives Matter,\u201d \u201cHeritage not Hate,\u201d \u201cOne Nation under God.\u201d For $1, you can have a fortune generated by a stern-faced Medicine Man in a glass case. Even if you don\u2019t buy anything, the fever dream stays with you, living out a half-life under your skin.<\/p>\n
We settled on a chocolate bar and two massive cups of coffee and were back on the road. We were on an \u201catomic tourism\u201d road trip. Our rented Kia Soul was strewn with camping gear, groceries and lots of sand. We\u2019d wanted to get out of the Bay Area for a little while, away from its tech fantasies and housing crunches. Leaving the birthplace of the microchip and Google, we came to see where the atomic bomb was born. Both of us were intrigued by New Mexico\u2019s nuclear past and with how that legacy has been branded, packaged and sold. That history seemed a dark undercurrent to the \u201cLand of Enchantment\u201d celebrated on the license plates in front of us. As we accelerated back onto the highway, a trio of military jets flew overhead, out over the desert.<\/p>\n
Tourism and destruction aren\u2019t easily separated here, especially after the invention of the atom bomb. From the road signs marking pueblos and Indian reservations, to patches of radioactive rabbitbrush in Bajo Canyon, New Mexico\u2019s cracked and cratered landscapes are riddled with violent histories, nuclear secrets, veins of turquoise and silver.<\/p>\n
The farther you drive, the more it fuses together in the Sangre de Cristo mountain light, a place where alien conspiracy theories on the radio are as eagerly received as the sacrament. Where thickly forested landscapes are punctuated with dusty arroyos, and linear particle accelerators are built on plateaus above centuries-old Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings. It was this enchanting mess that pulled us to the place where the atom was split, to create the world\u2019s first nuclear weapon. As we squinted down the highway, we saw a chain reaction of violence, ricocheting across the desert of history.<\/p>\n
June 1598. Juan de O\u00f1ate leads a group of Spanish conquistadors north along the Camino Real, across an unforgiving stretch of the Jornada del Muerto desert. When they reach the desert\u2019s northern edge, they receive food and water from the Piro Indians of the Teypana Pueblo. They rename the pueblo Socorro, meaning \u201chelp\u201d or \u201caid.\u201d<\/p>\n
January 1599. O\u00f1ate and his conquistadors kill 800 men, women and children at Acoma Pueblo, 60 miles west of what is now Albuquerque. Those who survive are sold into slavery. On O\u00f1ate\u2019s orders, the right foot of 24 male prisoners is amputated.<\/p>\n
We had just come from White Sands National Monument, an unending, undulating terrain of blindingly white sand dunes. To the west, just over the San Andres Mountains, lies the Jornada del Muerto, or \u201cJourney of the Dead.\u201d It was in that desert, just 60 miles from where we camped at White Sands, that the U.S. Army conducted the world\u2019s first detonation of a nuclear device on July 16, 1945. The test was code-named \u201cTrinity\u201d by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the \u201cfather of the atomic bomb,\u201d director of the government\u2019s Los Alamos Laboratory and Manhattan Project.<\/p>\n
It happened at 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time, just before sunrise. From our tent, the fireball would have been blinding, and we would have felt the shock of the blast, coming some seconds later. Witnesses described the explosion in terms of both beauty and terror, as brilliant, thunderous and menacing. Many saw the light turn from yellow to green to red to purple. Some experienced flash blindness. Oppenheimer recalled a verse from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: \u201cIf the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Within milliseconds, the bomb liquified the sand into little chunks of greenish glass; in a flash of divine violence, trinitite \u2014 the first human-made mineral \u2014 was born. A reporter for Time magazine described the bomb\u2019s crater as a lake of green jade, shaped like a splashy star. First reporters, and then the general public, flocked to the site (now only open two days a year) to collect these irradiated keepsakes. Today, it\u2019s illegal to take pieces home, though you can find a small chunk online for $35.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no trinitite in the White Sands National Monument gift shop, but you can buy vials of white sand. You are encouraged, as a visitor, to participate in the American pastime of pocketing land. And the land, as the National Park Service never tires of pointing out, is vast. White Sands National Monument sits on \u201cthe largest gypsum dunefield in the world,\u201d spanning 275 square miles of \u201cdazzling white sand dunes.\u201d It is, according to the park\u2019s website, \u201cthe perfect setting for commercial filming, photography, and various other art forms.\u201d It\u2019s disturbing to think that what happened in the New Mexico desert was somehow sanctioned by the desolation and awe of the landscape itself \u2014 a limitless canvas of swirling sand and searing light.<\/p>\n
August 1680. Inflamed by decades of colonial treachery and abuse, Pueblo Indians from across Nuevo M\u00e9xico rise up against the Spanish conquistadors. One of the main organizers is Pop\u00e9, religious leader from the Tewa Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh. Pop\u00e9\u2019s Rebellion succeeds in driving out the Spaniards, who do not regain control of the province until 1692. That year, Diego de Vargas promises protection to the Pueblo Indians if they swear allegiance to the king of Spain and the Christian God.<\/p>\n
Leaving White Sands, we passed through the Mescalero Reservation en route to Roswell. On the drive, we listened to a podcast that featured a \u201cUFOlogist\u201d who claimed that the famous 1947 Roswell UFO incident was not about extraterrestrial aliens at all. The aliens, he argued, were actually disabled Japanese patients who were used as test subjects. They\u2019d been interned at Fort Stanton, a little over an hour outside Roswell, during World War II.<\/p>\n
With so much of New Mexico\u2019s military history classified, it\u2019s hard to know what is true and what is not. But the state\u2019s tourism department builds its own version of truth, under its own official brand, \u201cNew Mexico True.\u201d The state\u2019s website calls it an \u201cauthentic\u201d experience, one that \u201cisn\u2019t about plastic replicas, papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 attractions, or contrived adventures.\u201d<\/p>\n
But much of what we found was indeed contrived, papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9\u2019d replicas. Roswell \u2013 consistently voted one of the worst tourist traps in the U.S. \u2013 epitomizes this. One of the state\u2019s poorest cities, it relies on its world-famous UFO industry. Driving up Main Street, you pass the International UFO Museum and Research Center, and a string of storefronts with vaguely extraterrestrial-sounding names: \u201cStellar Coffee,\u201d \u201cCosmic Salad,\u201d \u201cAlien Invasion Tee Shirts.\u201d The streetlights have slanted eyes and glow green at night. At the Roswell Walmart, cartoonish aliens painted on the windows beckon you in with long spindly fingers.<\/p>\n
July 1942. Two Japanese Americans, Toshiro Kobata and Hirota Isomura, are killed en route to the Lordsburg Internment Camp in New Mexico, where some 1,500 Japanese and Japanese Americans will be held by the end of WWII, shot in the back at close range by a sentry who sees them wandering off the road. It is possible that the two 58-year-old men were going to relieve themselves, since they had been denied the use of a restroom. The sentry is later acquitted of murder charges.<\/p>\n
We felt the change from Roswell to Los Alamos as we drove the 230 miles between them, finding up the mountains, ears popping with the elevation, temperatures dropping fast. We cranked up the heat and reached into the backseat for our jackets.<\/p>\n
Perched over 7,300 feet above sea level, on four mesas on the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico, Los Alamos is quiet, remote and beautiful \u2013 almost transcendental. It was the sublimity of Los Alamos that drew Robert Oppenheimer back to the area. He\u2019d spent time here as a teenager \u2013 hiking, camping, riding horses, breathing in the clean mountain particles \u2014 to convalesce from a long illness. Years later, when the Manhattan Project needed a secluded location to create the first nuclear weapon, Oppenheimer returned.<\/p>\n
Today, its fame as the birthplace of the atomic bomb makes Los Alamos seem like a likely hub of nuclear tourism. But since the Los Alamos National Laboratory is still fully operational, a rarefied air of secrecy and reserved professionalism persists. There are still gates, checkpoints and badges. As our tour guide, Georgia, would later explain to us, there is a deep ambivalence about tourism in the so-called \u201cSecret City.\u201d It hasn\u2019t fully commercialized its past. It doesn\u2019t need the money: The city is one of the wealthiest in the U.S., with the highest concentration of millionaires. Nested high up in the mountains, Los Alamos feels like it belongs to the sky.<\/p>\n
We entered town on the main drag, Trinity Drive. It was around 8 p.m., and we were starving. But the streets were deserted and every restaurant closed. Even the local wine bar, UnQuarked, was \u2026 well, quarked. A quick search on Yelp revealed that the \u201cAtomic Bar & Grill\u201d was our best bet. We found the bar in the middle of a Smith\u2019s grocery store, brightly lit, wedged between the deli and the produce. Three men were there drinking beers, watching Monday Night Football. We read down a list of sandwich names that included the \u201cManhattan Project\u201d and \u201cAmerica the Flavorful,\u201d but the place was no longer serving food. Instead, the bartender nodded toward the prepared foods \u2013 we could grab sushi and eat it at the bar.<\/p>\n
In the morning, we visited the Los Alamos History Museum. Its first room tells the city\u2019s history through a timeline, starting with the Ancestral Puebloans and ending with contemporary Los Alamos. There are two dates attached to the Puebloans: the 1150s, when they arrived on the plateau, and the 1550s, when, due to a drought, they left.<\/p>\n
There was no other mention of the Ancestral Puebloans in the museum, let alone any reference to Indigenous people, aside from the expensive Native jewelry and pottery in the gift shop. Yet Los Alamos occupies land that was loaned to the U.S. government during World War II by the San Ildefonso Pueblo, with the agreement that it would be returned once the war ended. Obviously, it was not. This has been a source of distress and anger among neighboring pueblos, not only San Ildefonso, because the land is widely recognized as sacred. It is now toxic from decades of the lab dumping untreated radioactive waste and other materials into the Los Alamos canyons that flow into the Rio Grande. The timeline conceals other acts of violence, too: There is no mention of bombs actually being dropped; no Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Only 1943, the start of the Manhattan Project, and 1945, the end of World War II \u2014 are noted. The timeline segues right into the Cold War, when Los Alamos became \u201ca thriving, internationally known town.\u201d<\/p>\n
May to July 1956. As part of Operation Redwing, the U.S. military conducts 17 nuclear test detonations in the Pacific Ocean, on the Bikini and Enewetak atolls. The tests are named Cherokee, Zuni, Yuma, Erie, Seminole, Blackfoot, Flathead, Osage, Inca, Dakota, Mohawk, Apache, Navajo, Huron. At 5 megatons, the most powerful detonation is Tewa, named for the Tewa people of northern New Mexico.<\/p>\n
We were the only two people in Georgia\u2019s yellow touring van that day, and though the tour was advertised as one and a half hours, it ended up being closer to four. Early on, she showed us her church, the United Church of Los Alamos, the town\u2019s first, chartered in 1947. It featured some shockingly beautiful stained-glass work \u2013 exploding galaxies, supernovas, planets and black holes swirled in cobalt. The panes were made by Robert Brownlee, an astrophysicist who worked at the lab in Los Alamos for 37 years, executing and analyzing nuclear tests at Bikini and Eniwetok and at the Nevada Test Site.<\/p>\n
As we stood before a window called \u201cThe Second Coming,\u201d our stomachs dropped. In the center of five panels, amid a swirling convergence of blue ribbons of light, pointing upwards toward a white cross at the arched apex of the pane, was the yellow silhouette of what appeared to be the nuclear warhead Fat Man the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Fat Man killed 40,000 people in an instant, a number that doubled in the days, weeks and months that followed. The bomb was code-named Fat Man because of its round, wide shape, exactly the same as the silhouette in the stained glass. The small white circles surrounding it look like ball bearings shooting out.<\/p>\n
In describing the window, Brownlee writes about the Omega Point. In the Book of Revelation, Christ says, \u201cI am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.\u201d Brownlee sees the Omega Point as the final destination, where history and humanity are fated to spiral towards a point of divine unity, making \u201clight from light.\u201d Jesus becomes an \u201caccelerator,\u201d speeding up the complexity of atoms and consciousness, producing enough energy to escape the \u201cheat death\u201d of the universe.<\/p>\n
The likeness between the Omega and Fat Man is unnerving. Whether Brownlee, the Christian nuclear scientist, meant to conjure Fat Man, seems impossible to know. We\u2019d seen Fat Man on earrings and pins and hats, but not yet gracing the walls of a church.<\/p>\n
August 1945. After attending an evening lecture, 24-year-old Los Alamos physicist Harry Daghlian returns to the remote Omega Site, where he\u2019s been running experiments on a plutonium core. He has an idea that involves stacking tungsten carbide bricks around the silvery plutonium sphere.<\/p>\n
Against official procedure, he works alone into the night, placing brick on brick, until one accidently slips from his hand.<\/p>\n
It falls down into the core.<\/p>\n
A flash of blue light fills the room. Daghlian feels a tingling. He will die 25 days later from acute radiation poisoning. After this and another accident in 1946, the core becomes known as the \u201cdemon core.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the tour, we headed down the mountain to Santa Fe. We were, in a way, retracing the same path that many Los Alamos scientists took back in 1945, after finding out that the Trinity test had been a \u201csuccess.\u201d Like us, they piled into cars and sped down to the famous La Fonda hotel on the Plaza. There, they drank and celebrated in the afterglow of the bomb. There was no feeling of guilt about Nagasaki or Hiroshima, at least not yet; that would happen later. This is something the museums never mentioned: Einstein\u2019s regret, Oppenheimer\u2019s despair, Otto Frisch\u2019s feeling of \u201cnausea\u201d when he watched his friends in Los Alamos once again rush down to La Fonda, this time with news from Japan.<\/p>\n
La Fonda continues to celebrate its role in this history. In conjunction with Santa Fe\u2019s 2018 \u201cAtomic Summer\u201d programming, the hotel offered a one-night package: luxury accommodations, breakfast for two, admission to the nearby \u201cAtomic Histories\u201d exhibition, and a complimentary copy of Oppenheimer\u2019s biography. We missed the special, but managed to book a discounted room with the slightest view of the mountains. As the night wound down and the lingerers at the bar tipped back the last of their martinis, we eyed the bartenders suspiciously. We\u2019d heard that during the Manhattan Project, FBI agents infiltrated La Fonda\u2019s staff. We kept up a spirit of secrecy, peering into empty ballrooms, tiptoeing across the lobby, with its hodgepodge of Mission-era altarpieces and Zuni animal fetishes, half looking for ghosts.<\/p>\n
Before leaving town, we visited 109 East Palace, the Manhattan Project\u2019s secret office, where new scientists would check in before making the journey to Los Alamos. The original gate is no longer there \u2014 we had seen its ominous, prison-style iron bars displayed in the Los Alamos History Museum. Instead, the new door was wide open. It\u2019s now home to Chocolate and Cashmere, a boutique billing itself as a \u201ccelebration of the senses \u2026 a room painted like the inside of a chocolate wrapper; color and more color; everything is soft and oh so yummy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Outside, there\u2019s a large mural of Oppenheimer. He\u2019s silhouetted with pipe in hand, standing in the desert, a rainbow scarf billowing in the wind. He\u2019s blowing smoke rings: They spell out \u201cChocolate + Cashmere.\u201d Like everyone else, we took pictures.<\/p>\n
LuLing Osofsky is a writer, educator and Ph. D. student in visual studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Key MacFarlane is a geographer and a Ph. D. candidate in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This article was first published on hcn.org.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" nuclear tourism booms in the Land of Enchantment, histories of violence are packaged, sold and consumed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":93763,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[138,5037],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-93762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-new-mexico","tag-nuclear-weapons"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93762"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=93762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}