I Walked in Trinity A-Bomb Crater

I AM STANDING at the gateway to Armageddon, and I’m locked out.

“This key doesn’t fit,” my guide says, jiggling a standard-issue padlock, as if that might help. “They must have changed the lock.”

We look at each other with “Well, now what?” expressions. We have just spent a half hour in a pickup truck, bumping 17 miles across a scrub-strewn landscape from the north gate of New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range. Now we are staring at a chain-link fence that curves away from us in both directions, creating a mile-long circle around one of the most significant sites in human history: ground zero of the first atomic bomb blast.