US’ Trinity Test led to the dawn of the atomic age

Hundreds of US scientists and military personnel, who had taken cover at bunkers located around 10,000 yards away from the bomb celebrated the dawn of the nuclear age. On July 16, 1945 (exactly 75 years ago), the world’s first super bomb exploded in a desert in New Mexico, destroying everything in its vicinity and marking the dawn of the nuclear age.

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Key-Points

Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear device.

It was conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project.

The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 56 km southeast of Socorro, New Mexico. The test was planned and directed by Kenneth Bainbridge.

The test was of an implosion-design plutonium device, informally nicknamed “The Gadget”, of the same design as the Fat Man bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.

Manhattan Project

WWII and a warning: After Germany initiated World War II by invading Poland, Nobel prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein warned then-US President Franklin D Roosevelt of the potential threat posed by an atomic weapon being developed by Adolf Hitler.

The United States launched a secret atomic research undertaking: Code-named the Manhattan Project, which sought to develop an atomic weapon to end the war with the help of the country’s leading atomic experts as well as exiled scientists and physicists from Germany and other Nazi-occupied nations.

Pearl Harbour and the push to the project: It was only after the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the Japanese Navy Air Service in 1941, when the US decided to enter the Second World War and the project was officially kicked into gear.

The Los Alamos team (headed by J Robert Oppenheimer later “father of the atomic bomb”) developed two types of bombs – one was uranium based, later code-named ‘the Little Boy’ before it was dropped on Hiroshima and the other had a plutonium core.