Trinity!

Zhukov

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Everywhere, simultaneously.
60 years ago this morning, the world was changed forever.

On 16 July 1945 in the middle of the New Mexico desert, far from any human habitation, humanity entered the Nuclear Age.

In Alamogordo, New Mexico scientists from the nearby Los Alamos laboratory working on the U.S. government’s secret Manhattan Project successfully detonated the world’s first fissile nuclear bomb at Trinity Site.

Placed atop this 150-ft tall scaffolding…

fig40.jpg


…the 18.6 kiloton plutonium device, Gadget…

gadget_complete3.jpg


…was triggered at 5:30am local time.

The tower was vaporized.

The surrounding asphalt was blasted into green sand.

Observers standing ten miles away were knocked over.

Trinity.jpg


Less than a month later, demonstrating to the world the awesome power of the atomic bomb, the Japanese industrial centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be annihilated by Gadget’s descendants, Little Boy and Fat Man.

The world would never be the same.

War, that effort which had punctuated, indeed defined, human history since people began recording history, now entailed within it the possibility of the very extinction of the human race.

"Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
~ J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad-Gita
 
glenn seaborg was my neighbor....my uncle ended up at livermore lab....
 

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