Trinity Site

In 1962 General Leslie Groves wrote to ask whether Trinity had been picked because the name was common on western rivers and peaks. Oppenheimer replied that he had suggested it, but not for that reason. He quoted Donne's Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness, written just before the poet's death, then the sonnet that opens Batter my heart, three-person'd God, and said that beyond this he had no clues. His brother Frank, beside him at the test, remembered him saying something plainer than scripture: it worked. The test site lies well south of this highway pullout.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Trinity Site The nuclear age began with the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site on July 16, 1945. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, stated that he suggested " Trinity, "perhaps from the poetry of John Donne. After the blast, he was said to have recalled the line from the Bhagavad Gita, " Now, I am Become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge — 14 mi
  A Rio Grande refuge south of Socorro where cranes and geese winter by the tens of thousands on wetlands and fields kept by people, because the river no longer floods to make them.
• Trinity Site — 18 mi
  Where the first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945, open one day a year, and remembered by its neighbors as the start of decades of illness the government took eighty years to acknowledge.

More markers nearby

• Carthage-Tokay-Farley — 3.1 mi
• San Pedro — 10 mi
• San Antonio — 12 mi
• Jumbo — 17 mi