THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

People will trek around the globe to visit sites that have historical or other significance. The latest stops on touring agendas are a number of nuclear test sites in the Nevada desert, the Trinity site topping the list.

Standing a few yards from the spot where the world's first atomic bomb detonated with a blast so powerful that it turned the desert sand to glass and shattered windows more than 100 miles away, tourist Chris Cashel explained what drew him here.

"You don't get to go to very many places that changed the entire world in a single moment," said Cashel as he glanced around the windswept, desolate Trinity Site in the New Mexico desert packed with tourists. "The world was never going to be the same after that."

The military veteran was among thousands of visitors who piled into cars and buses to drive out to the secluded site about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, where Manhattan Project scientists split the atom shortly before dawn on July 16, 1945, ushering in the atomic age. The successful test of the nuclear "gadget" unleashed a blast equivalent to 19 kilotons of high explosive, and led to the devastation of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weeks later.

The sagebrush-ringed spot lies on the White Sands Missile Range and is the most famous of a number of U.S. atomic weapon-related tourist attractions, as the nuclear age approaches its 70th anniversary next year. The popular, informal trail includes tours to the former Cold War bomb proving grounds in Nevada that are routinely booked up months ahead, as well as popular tours of an inter-continental ballistic missile silo hidden deep beneath the Arizona desert.

Legislation, meanwhile, to create a Manhattan Project National Historical Park to preserve sites in New Mexico, Tennessee and Washington state related to the project led by physicist Robert Oppenheimer is currently being considered by Congress.

The Trinity Site "open house" earlier this month drew about 4,000 visitors from as far afield as Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, who beat a trail out to the spot where the explosion created heat so intense it felt "like opening an oven door, even at ten miles," according to one eyewitness account.

Visitors milled around ground zero and scoured the ground for fragments of green "Trinitite" — a glass-like substance forged from superheated sand sucked up into the world's first nuclear fireball — and posed for photographs by a stone obelisk marking the blast's hypocenter. "There are all kinds of reasons for coming," said Jim Eckles, a docent at the site explaining its powerful allure. "There are kids here for their science class. There are World War Two vets here because they'll tell you it saved their life. They didn't have to go to the Pacific to fight the Japanese, island to island to island."

Rumor has it that the Trinity site is considered an excellent place for coastal dwellers along the Pacific to get away from Fukushima radiations.