Word: crater
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...only a fortnight later, a V-2 went wild internationally. It hit four miles from the center of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico (pop. 48,881), made a fearful bang and dug a crater 24 feet deep and 40 feet in diameter. No one was hurt, and the people of Juarez, enjoying their spring fiesta, thought the bang was part of the show. But the diplomatic repercussions were painful. The White Sands brass, covered with cold sweat, told Karsch to work out a system for riding herd on rockets...
Last week, on the fourth anniversary of the explosion of the first atomic bomb, reporters were being shown around the crater at "Trinity," birthplace of the Atomic Age. The crater, still surrounded by a high wire fence, is still radioactive. A man lying down in it for only a few hours would get all the radiation he could safely absorb in a week...
Green Scum & Twisted Steel. Since the crater was first shown to outsiders (TIME, Sept. 17, 1945), its appearance has become less dramatic. There are no longer any lead-shielded, white-painted Sherman tanks lumbering about the crater. The great sheet of crackly "trinitite" (glassy melted soil) that looked like a scummy green lake has largely disintegrated; only a faint green ghost of it remains among the returning vegetation. Occasionally, fragments glitter in the sun. The crater is still a shallow, rimless saucer pressed down into the earth by the force of the explosion. In it may be seen...
Tumbleweed & Antelope. Most of their findings were negative. Both plants and animals have come back with a rush to the atom-blasted area. The crater itself is thick with tumbleweeds and lively grasshoppers. There are rattlesnakes, lizards, pack rats and mice in the vicinity-none of them, apparently, the worse for their hot habitat. A cottontail rabbit has a home in the crater itself. The antelope (which local stories said had been frightened into Mexico) are back in the great arid valley...
...conditions in this region and in the crater still dangerous to man? Says Dr Bellamy: "No man knows. No firm answer can be given." The radioactivity in the crater itself, he thinks, may last two or three hundred years...