Society, economy & sport

Trinity

16 July 1945

Trinity was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, carried out by the United States in the Jornada del Muerto desert of southern New Mexico. The device was a plutonium implosion bomb, nicknamed the Gadget, and it was the same type used on Nagasaki less than a month later. The test was the culmination of the Manhattan Project, directed scientifically by J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos and by General Leslie Groves for the army. It created a huge fireball and a mushroom cloud, and it melted desert sand into a green glass later called trinitite. Many of the scientists present were deeply affected, and Oppenheimer later recalled lines from the Bhagavad Gita on witnessing it.

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This moment belongs to the Contemporary world (1945 CE to today), the world since 1945. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.