Desert shares its atomic secrets

For many visitors, this isn't history so much as personal experience, stirring memories of the end of a world war and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. And arriving here means revisiting the irresolvable moral question of whether the certain deaths of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians were preferable to the probable deaths of thousands of American troops had the war in the Pacific sputtered on a few more months.

Standing here, it's hard to shake a mixed feeling of horror and awe. The gadget was suspended from a metal tower and detonated 100 feet above ground.

The mushroom cloud went up more than seven miles. In an official history of the site, Hans Bethe, one of the scientists involved, described a "giant magnesium flare" that "grew and after a few seconds became clouded with dust whipped up by the explosion from the ground and rose and left behind a black trail of dust particles."

The blast, instead of heaving up the earth like a mortar shell, dented the ground 8 feet deep and 800 yards across. A small mound of cement and the stubs of metal bars are all that remain of the tower. The intense heat changed the sand around it to a greenish silica dubbed Trinitite. Scores of visitors walk the site looking down, poking at rocks with their shoes, as guards and volunteers warn against picking up the radioactive pebbles.

Site administrators say that an hour or so of exposure here is less than you receive from a dental X-ray or during a cross-country plane trip. Still, it's hard to shake the disquiet embedded from 1960s elementary school civil defense drills. After you've crouched under your desk to save your first-grade buns from the nefarious Soviet missiles, it's hard to stand still here for long. Especially when people in uniform tell you it's unhealthy to touch a stone.

Ears on the universe

About 90 minutes later, I drive back north on Interstate 25 to Socorro, then cut west 50 miles on U.S. 60 through another stretch of stunningly empty land until I crest a mountain pass into a high plain almost 7,000 feet above sea level. In the distance, a giant white beach umbrella seems to sprout from the middle of the range, then others come into view. They are huge, resembling massive satellite dishes, each one nearly the size of a baseball diamond. There are 27 in all, laid out in a Y-formation with each arm stretching 5 miles.

It looks as though Christo's been here.