The United States became the first country to successfully detonate an atomic weapon, signalling the start of a new era in warfare and politics, on July 16, 1945.
The U.S. government in the early 1940s authorised a top-secret program of nuclear testing and development and codenamed it “The Manhattan Project”. The goal of this project was to develop the first atomic bomb in the world.
In Los Alamos, New Mexico, the United States carried out most of the research and development for the Manhattan Project. The Los Alamos scientists finally, in July 1945, successfully developed and exploded their first atomic bomb at a test site in nearby Alamogordo. The test site was codenamed, Trinity.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, was the one who assigned the test site its codename under the inspiration of the poetry of John Donne. The test was made of an implosion-design plutonium device, nicknamed “The Gadget”, and the same design as the Fat Man bomb, which was later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.
The design was so demanding that it required significant help from the laboratory as there were multiple concerns about how it would work and its possibility. This spurred the decision to conduct the first nuclear test. There was a lot of uncertainty about what would happen when the gadget went off, and there was the worry that the chain reaction would react with the entire atmosphere and be unstoppable.
Enrico Fermi went around before the test and took bets from some high-ranking military personnel and physicists on the chances of the bomb destroying all of Mexico or the planet. However, before the scientists had been conducted, they had done some maths which showed that the world wouldn’t be destroyed, but most of the others didn’t know it and were anxious.
The bomb was put on top of a 100-foot tower for detonation to show what a bomb being dropped from an aeroplane would be like. The bomb exploded at 5:29 am, and about 240 people witnessed it. They said that the bomb lit the early morning sky brighter than full daylight for a few seconds, and they felt a wave of heat roll over them that was “as hot as an oven”, even from a distance of 10 miles away.
This shock wave took 40 seconds to reach the others and was felt as far as 100 miles away. The bomb destroyed the tower it was placed on with its strength of 21,000 tons of TNT. This marked the start of the nuclear age.
