Bainbridge finally selected a desert site sixty miles northwest of Alamogordo. The Spanish had called the area the Jornada del Muerto—the “Journey of Death.” Here the Army staked out an area eighteen by twenty-four miles in size, evicted a few ranchers by eminent domain and began building a field laboratory and hardened bunkers from which to observe the first explosion of an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer dubbed the test site “Trinity”—though years later, he wasn’t quite sure why he chose such a name. He remembered vaguely having in mind a John Donne poem that opens with the line “Batter my heart,
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