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—— ON THIS DAY ——
JULY 16, 1945
Jornada del Muerto desert, New Mexico, USA
80 years ago
The Trinity test, July 16, 1945 — the first detonation of a nuclear device, conducted in the New Mexico desert as the culmination of the Manhattan Project.
At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, in a remote stretch of the New Mexico desert that the Spanish had called the Jornada del Muerto — the Journey of the Dead Man — the first nuclear weapon in history was detonated. The test, codenamed Trinity, was the culmination of the Manhattan Project, the vast, secret, three-year effort by the United States to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could. The explosion released energy equivalent to about 21,000 tons of TNT, vaporized the steel tower on which the device sat, and turned the desert sand to glass.
The flash was visible for hundreds of miles and was brighter than the midday sun. Observers, lying in trenches miles away, felt the heat on their skin and saw the fireball rise into a mushroom cloud over seven miles high. The scientists who had spent years building the device watched with a mixture of triumph, relief, and dread. Many of them understood immediately that they had crossed a threshold from which there was no return — that human beings now possessed the power to destroy themselves.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Manhattan Project — the secret American program to develop the atomic bomb, directed scientifically by J. Robert Oppenheimer and militarily by General Leslie Groves.
The Manhattan Project was one of the largest scientific and engineering undertakings in history, employing some 130,000 people and costing about $2 billion (equivalent to tens of billions today), all in total secrecy. It was directed scientifically by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer at the laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and militarily by General Leslie Groves. It drew on the work of many of the greatest physicists of the age, including refugees from fascist Europe who feared what would happen if Hitler got the bomb first.
Oppenheimer's reaction to the test became legendary. He later recalled that the explosion brought to his mind a line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' The test director, Kenneth Bainbridge, put it more bluntly, telling Oppenheimer: 'Now we are all sons of bitches.' The scientists' awareness of what they had unleashed — and their subsequent struggles with the moral implications — became one of the defining ethical dramas of the twentieth century.
The consequences came swiftly. Three weeks after Trinity, on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing an estimated 140,000 people by the end of the year. Three days later, a second bomb destroyed Nagasaki. Japan surrendered, ending the Second World War. But the atomic age had begun, and with it the nuclear arms race, the Cold War balance of terror, and the permanent possibility of human self-extinction. The Trinity test was the moment humanity acquired the power to end its own civilization — a power it has lived with, uneasily, ever since.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Trinity marked the moment humanity acquired the power of self-destruction. The successful test proved that nuclear weapons were real and workable. From that moment, the human species has possessed the capacity to destroy its own civilization — a fundamental and permanent change in the human condition.
It was the culmination of the largest scientific project in history. The Manhattan Project demonstrated what concentrated scientific and industrial effort could achieve, for better and worse. It established the model of large-scale, government-directed 'big science' that has characterized much of the research since.
It forced a permanent reckoning with the ethics of science. The scientists' anguish over what they had created — captured in Oppenheimer's haunted reflections — became the defining example of the moral responsibility of scientists for the consequences of their work, a question that has only grown more urgent.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the New Mexico desert lit up brighter than the sun. The atomic bomb worked. Three weeks later, two Japanese cities were destroyed. The scientists who built it understood they had changed the human condition forever — giving our species, for the first time, the power to destroy itself.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
— J. Robert Oppenheimer, recalling his reaction to the Trinity test, quoting the Bhagavad Gita
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Trinity test, the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the beginning of the atomic age?
