LOS ALAMOS, N.M.—An unknown blast shook the desolate New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, unsettling the historic Hispanic village of Tularosa.
Most residents lacked phones and radios, so they relaxed when Army officials said it was just an ammunition explosion — despite the raining ash.
They didn’t learn scientists from the then-secret city of Los Alamos successfully detonated the first atomic bomb at the nearby Trinity Site until after the U.S. announced it had dropped the weapon on Japan a month later, helping end World War II.
“It was a source of pride,” Tina Cordova, a former Tularosa resident whose father was 3 years old during the Trinity Test.
Tina Cordova talks of her late father, Anastacio Cordova, in her Albuquerque home. Cordova believes her father, who died in 2013 after suffering from multiple bouts of cancer, was affected by the atomic bomb Trinity Test in New Mexico since he lived in nearby Tularosa, N.M. as a child.AP Photo/Russell Contreras
