This July 16 marks the 83rd anniversary of the Trinity test, the first explosion of a nuclear weapon, by the United States, which took place in a remote enclave in the New Mexico desert.
The detonated bomb used plutonium as fissionable material, just like the one dropped weeks later on Nagasaki, Japan. The first atomic bomb, the from Hiroshima, was made from uranium 235.
The creation of nuclear weapons was raised as a result of the growing international political tension and the scientific advances of the late 1930s. Already in the middle of World War II, the American effort became the manhattan projectwith the aim of having an atomic bomb before Hitler’s Germany.
By mid-1945, with the Nazis defeated and Japan presenting a bitter resistance that was already spreading to its national territory, this enormous research work had paid off.
At 052945 local time on July 16, 1945, the device exploded with an energy equivalent to 19 kilotons, equivalent to 19,000 tons of TNT. It left a crater on the desert floor 3 meters deep and 330 meters wide. At the time of detonation, the surrounding mountains were illuminated for one to two seconds. Observed colors of illumination ranged from purple to green, and finally to white. The boom from the explosion took 40 seconds to reach the observers and the shock wave could be felt 160 kilometers away. The mushroom cloud reached 12 kilometers.
At 05:29:45 local time on July 16, the device exploded with an energy equivalent to 19 kilotons, equivalent to 19,000 tons of TNT. It left a crater on the desert floor 3 meters deep and 330 meters wide. At the moment of the detonation, the surrounding mountains were illuminated for one to two seconds. Observed colors of illumination ranged from purple to green, and finally to white. The boom from the explosion took 40 seconds to reach the observers and the shock wave could be felt 160 kilometers away. The mushroom cloud reached 12 kilometers.
Los Alamos director Robert Oppenheimer, who observed the test, later commented that the event reminded him of a line from the famous Indian text Bhagavad Gita: “I have become death, a destroyer of worlds”.
A NEW MINERAL EMERGED
Richard Feynman claimed to be the only observer to see the explosion without dark glasses, shielding himself from harmful ultraviolet rays only behind the glass of a truck, Wikipedia reports.
In the crater, the desert sand, composed mainly of silica, melted into a light green glass, which was called trinitite. The crater was filled in after the test, and the military reported the event as an accidental explosion at a munitions disposal area, which was not denied nor made public until August 6, after the attack on Hiroshima.
Around 260 people witnessed the test, none within a distance of less than 9 kilometers.
The area was declared a National Historic Monument in 1975 and is accessible to the public on the first Saturday of April and October. There is still a little residual radiation at the site. The Trinity Monument, made of a rough, dark obelisk-shaped rock about 3.6 meters high, marks the hypocenter of the explosion.