Paris Howard was a member of the Special Engineering Detachment (SED) assigned to Los Alamos from May 1945 to April 1946. He was one of the later recruits assigned to the SED as the race for the bomb intensified in 1945. His first assignment was as a maintenance technician at the Trinity site outside Alamagordo, New Mexico. While there, he worked on repairing instrument gauges and other technical equipment. On July 16th, 1945, Howard witnessed the first atomic detonation in history at the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico.