NONFICTION - Jan. 19, 1992

TRINITY’S CHILDREN: Living Along America’s Nuclear Highway by Tad Bartimus and Scott McCartney (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $21.95; 326 pp.). The road to which Associate Press reporters Tad Bartimus and Scott McCartney refer in this book’s subtitle is Interstate 25, the thousand-mile asphalt spine that extends from New Mexico into Wyoming and that ties together much of America’s nuclear-weapons industry. It’s all here--the proving grounds at the White Sands Missile Range, the Los Alamos and Sandia weapons-research labs, Department of Defense subcontractor Cray Computer in Colorado Springs, the plutonium-polluted Rocky Flats weapons plant--and of course many of the nuclear missiles themselves, in silos in Wyoming. “Trinity’s Children” has no central argument, being a collection of generally unconnected stories, but the authors provide a number of memorable encounters. There are the Quakers working in weapons research who wonder if they’re doing the right thing; the Wyoming rancher who turned anti-missile activist after living for years with Minutemen buried literally in her own back yard; the man who bought an abandoned Atlas missile silo for $3,116.66 and now calls it home. Science and nature are indeed much at odds along I-25, and one cannot blame the locals for wondering how an area of such beauty could give birth to weapons of absolute destruction.