"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
At 5:29 AM in the New Mexico desert, the United States detonated the first nuclear bomb in history. This event was code-named Trinity.
This wasn’t just a test. It was the singular moment that the world changed forever.
For the scientists and military officials present, Trinity was the culmination of the Manhattan Project, a secrete wartime effort to build atomic weapons before Nazi Germany could. By the summer of 1945, the bomb was no longer a hypothetical deterrent. It had become a real weapon of war. Some were relieved, some were horrified. Everyone recognized it’s significance.
The Manhattan Project was led by scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer, often called the “father of the atomic bomb”.
Oppenheimer’s team included some of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th century: Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, and dozens of others. But genius wasn’t the only ingredient. Trinity was a product of political fear and technological escalation under the shadow of total war.
No one knew what would happen when the bomb went off. Some hypothesized it might ignite the atmosphere and engulf the whole world in a giant ball of flames. Thankfully, it didn’t. At least not upon ignition. The final outcome is still to be seen.
At the moment of the blast, a searing white flash lit up the dark morning skies above the desert. The fireball rose and formed the first ever mushroom cloud. Observers standing miles away could feel the heat on their faces.
The bomb yielded equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT, and melted the sand below it into radioactive glass. Shockwaves rippled out from ground zero.
The incredible power from this first explosion is dwarfed by the weapons of today.
Just three short weeks later, two nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 200,000 people. This first use did finalize the end of World War II, but also served as the first irreversible step into a world where total destruction became possible.