quasar
December 14, 2000, 12:22am
1
I was at the bookstore earlier today and found a nice book about World War II. While browsing it, I found something that perplexed me. They stated that the code name for the test site where the first A-bomb was detonated was S-site. I have always understood that it was named Trinity site.
Could anyone use their expertise to help me verify this?. Also, does any of you know what criteria is used to assign those names? Thanks.
I wanted to feel the power between my legs–Rockhound , while sitting on the nuke, back on the asteroid.
Merry X-mas, and a happy new…Millenium!!!
This page refers to the “S-Site” and Trinity as separate facilities used by the Manhattan Project:
The Manhattan Project buildings and structures supported the World War II effort to create the first Atomic Bomb. At Los Alamos, some of the structures include Fuller Lodge, the Bathtub Row Houses behind Fuller Lodge, the Omega West Reactor Building in Los Alamos Canyon, the laboratory buildings at S-Site south of the town site, Edith Warner’s house at Otowi Crossing, the bridge over the Rio Grande that carried the bomb to Trinity, 109 E. Palace in Santa Fe where Dorothy McKibben welcomed new arrivals to the top secret project, McDonald’s Ranch House at Trinity where the final assembly of the bomb occurred, Ground Zero at Trinity and other supporting structures at both Los Alamos and the Trinity Site.
The official Los Alamos National Laboratory virtual tour says:
S Site is named after a sawmill operation established in 1899 by lumberman Henry Buckman. Homesteading began soon afterward and continued until the land was acquired in 1943 by the War Department.
Today, this site is used for environmental testing of nuclear weapons systems, and is the home of the new Weapons Engineering Tritium Facility. Development and testing of high explosives, plastics and adhesives, and research on process development for manufacture of items using these and other materials, are accomplished here.
It sounds like it was part of the facilities used to develop the atomic bomb, but not the actual test site. From above, “S-Site” comes from “sawmill”; the origin of “Trinity” is evidently less clear; this web page gives a couple of possibilites:
The origin of the code name Trinity for the test site is also interesting, but the true source is unknown. One popular account attributes the name to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the Manhattan Project. According to this version, the well read Oppenheimer based the name Trinity on the fourteenth Holy Sonnet by John Donne, a 16th century English poet and sermon writer. The sonnet started, “Batter my heart, three-personed God.”[2] Another version of the name’s origin comes from University of New Mexico historian Ferenc M. Szasz. In his 1984 book, The Day the Sun Rose Twice, Szasz quotes Robert W. Henderson head of the Engineering Group in the Explosives Division of the Manhattan Project. Henderson told Szasz that the name Trinity came from Major W. A. (Lex) Stevens. According to Henderson, he and Stevens were at the test site discussing the best way to haul Jumbo (see below) the thirty miles from the closest railway siding to the test site. “A devout Roman Catholic, Stevens observed that the railroad siding was called ‘Pope’s Siding.’ He [then] remarked that the Pope had special access to the Trinity, and that the scientists would need all the help they could get to move the 214 ton Jumbo to its proper spot.”[3]
Several other web sites say Oppenheimer chose the name.