It all started hereThe U.S. Army allows civilians access to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico twice a year on the first Saturdays in April and October. This is where they allow them to see the Trinity Site, which is the site of the first nuclear explosion and the beginning of the history of nuclear terror. J. Robert Oppenheimer was the physicist responsible for the Manhattan Project, which led to the building of the bomb. He was inspired by lines such as these from John Donne's poems.Three-person God, I beg you to bless my heart.The Trinity website stated that the Stallion Gate would be open at 8 a.m., and when we arrived just after the crack of dawn, there was a caravan of four-mile-long cars ahead. Michael Turner, a friend and cosmologist who recently retired from the University of Chicago was the inspiration for our visit. He is now associated with the Kavli Foundation Los Angeles.Dr. Turner grew up in the Promethean promise that the mushroom cloud would bring and 20th-century science. Everyone who is a physicist has worked on the Manhattan Project. Dr. Turner, a young physicist from the 1960s and 1970s, was part of a group of young physicists that invaded astronomy and transformed cosmology into particle Physics or vice versa. He said that he had not been to the Trinity Site before and hadn't realized you could until recently. It was also difficult to access the site on two days per year.Robert J. Miller, a friend from his college days at the California Institute of Technology was with him. He had been instrumental in the invention of the computer touch pad. The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta was the day we were visiting, so the hotels were packed. We had to share one room. I don't remember who paid for it; I did pay for the rental car. Nobody snorted.After getting inside the gate, we drove for half an hour past desert hills sprinkled with radar and telescope domes to reach a dusty lot manned by young Army camo-clad men. One corner of the lot was occupied by a line of port-a potties, as if they were performing at an outdoor rock concert.
