![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Two days before Trinity, the canyon was the site of the Creutz Test-the first full-scale trial of the Fat Man bomb’s explosives without the nuclear core. This article is a selection from the July/August 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine Subscribe PAJARITO CANYON This fortified structure, called Battleship Bunker, sheltered scientists during weapons testing in the canyon. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $15 They called it Perro Caliente, reportedly because Oppenheimer shouted “Hot dog!” when he found out the cabin was available. Later, he and his family bought a cabin in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. But he’d fallen in love with the wilderness near Santa Fe during his teens and 20s. A native of New York City, he hadn’t always strutted around in cowboy boots. ![]() The effort needed a remote location, but Oppenheimer was especially partial to the Ranch School site. The physicists working there were part of the ultra-secret Manhattan Project, and they had one goal-developing the first nuclear weapon before the Nazis beat them to it. Oppenheimer, then 38, had been tapped to lead a facility that government documents called Project Y. I was impressed, even in that brief meeting, by his nervous energy and by the intensity of the blue eyes that seemed to take in everything at a glance, like a bird flying from branch to branch in a deep forest.” “Cowboy boots and all,” she wrote, “he hurried in the front door and out the back, peering quickly into the kitchen and bedrooms. As bulldozers arrived on the New Mexico campus, she had her first glimpse of J. A local poet named Peggy Pond Church, daughter of the school’s founder, later described the “element of extreme haste and mystery” that surrounded the whole operation. In February 1943, the Los Alamos Ranch School, an outdoorsy institution for boys, abruptly closed its doors so the U.S. ![]()
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