Buses arrive and depart, some carrying visitors to the nearby MacDonald Ranch House. There the bomb was assembled; despite being just two miles from the test site, the house received little damage. Today it’s been restored to its 1945 state, with small placards explaining how each room was used. People wander through like a crowd of dislocated house-hunters, browsing their way through the absent past.

Someone later comments on the somberness of the place, as though it were a memorial or a tomb. Yet standing in that unremarkable stretch of desert it’s hard to know what should be mourned — or who. It would be different to stand in Nagasaki, with the tragedy there all too apparent. But there’s something harder to grasp here, an immensity beyond chronology. From the distance of seventy years, the atomic test seems less a part of history than the beginning of it, some epochal gateway that, once passed through, grows opaque.

Maybe it’s merely the half-life of history. Most of the people who come here are natives of the atomic age, born into it as fish is born into water and just as incapable of imagining otherwise. The lived experience of a pre-atomic age dwindles and winks out; similarly, the world-changing events of our own time will recede into simplicity, come to seem inevitable. Creation myths for the next age.

you find yourself staring into the glare of the future, as blind as the men at Trinity

So you stand in the barren landscape, among the scouring sand and try to reconcile all that emptiness with the story of what happened here: "Trinity Site: where the world’s first nuclear device was exploded on July 16, 1945." The bomb proliferates. By the moment of the test another, simpler type of gadget was already loaded on a ship, destined for Hiroshima. Twice it was used in war, followed by innumerable tests. It spread to enemies and allies, diffused without being defused. And wondering where it will go next, you find yourself staring into the glare of the future, as blind as the men at Trinity, shielding their eyes from the white-hot fires of the sun they’d made.