Sixty Army officers learned to assemble atomic bombs on this airfield in 1945. Today the largest nuclear stockpile in the world sits across the runway.
A Pirep featured story · KABQ Albuquerque International Sunport, Albuquerque, NM
In the summer of 1945, while Hiroshima was still rubble, the U.S. Army faced a new problem. The two August missions had used every assembled atomic bomb in inventory. The production line that built them — fewer than three hundred people in temporary buildings — was scattered across mesas at seven thousand feet at Los Alamos. If America was going to keep nuclear weapons, it needed a place to assemble them at scale, near a runway long enough for heavy bombers, and not Los Alamos.
J. Robert Oppenheimer picked Albuquerque. The Z Division of Los Alamos was established July 12, 1945, four days before Trinity, and tasked with the ordnance and assembly work that the lab had outgrown. By September the first units were moving down to Oxnard Field, a former municipal airport east of Kirtland Field. The new operation took its name from the mountains: Sandia Base.
General Leslie Groves dispatched Colonel Gilbert Dorland to make sure the bombs would be ready when needed. Dorland assembled about sixty young Army officers — the Sandia Pioneers — and put them through the assembly courses. They learned to put a Fat Man together, mate it to a delivery aircraft, and load it on the bomb bay rack. They flew their practice missions in B-29s out of Kirtland, alongside the 509th Bombardment Group, the successor unit to the men who had flown the originals to Japan.
By 1948 Z Division had become Sandia Laboratory under the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1971 the bases merged: Kirtland Field, the old Manzano weapons-storage installation, and Sandia Base all became one complex known as Kirtland Air Force Base. The civilian Albuquerque Sunport sits on the north side, sharing runways with the Air Force.
What sits on the south side is harder to talk about. Activated in 1992, the Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex is the largest single nuclear weapons storage facility in the United States and probably the world. Public estimates run as high as 2,500 warheads. The 898th Munitions Squadron, reporting to Air Force Global Strike Command, runs it. Most are awaiting dismantlement, but the bunkers are very much active. Sandia National Laboratories, just up the road from the runways, still designs the non-nuclear components of every American warhead in the active stockpile.
You depart KABQ from the airfield where the bomb was operationalized. The mountains the field was named for are off your wing. The largest nuclear stockpile on earth is behind you.