Download the high-resolution image here

Trinity test

On July 16th, 1945, at 5:30 am, the first man-made nuclear explosion—code name Trinity—happened in the Jornada del Muerto desert, New Mexico. The test was the completion of many months of plutonium production and arduous research on the physics of implosion. The test was nearly called off many times in the few days leading up to it due to imperfections in assembly, bad weather, and bad data. Nonetheless, it successfully liberated the equivalent energy of about 25 kilotons of TNT in fractions of a second, changing the world forever.

Source: Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. 25th anniversary ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012

Trinity Site Explosion, 0.016 seconds after explosion, July 16, 1945
Trinity Site Explosion, 0.016 seconds after explosion, July 16, 1945
Public Domain

Back to archive



Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!