July 16, 1945. 5:29 AM Mountain Time, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. (Shamelessly stolen from myself. Well, mostly.)
Even with Cold War 2.0 ramping up, and people like the bureaucratic idiots who work for NYC talking about nuclear explosions, I don't think many people will mark tomorrow's anniversary. (The image to the right is of The Gadget being readied for detonation.
The Gadget was detonated - the 1st atomic explosion - by the Manhattan Project. It was a plutonium implosion device.
At 05:29:21 (July 16, 1945) local time, the device exploded. It left a crater of radioactive glass in the desert 10 feet (3.0 m) deep and 1,100 feet (340 m) wide. At the time of detonation, the surrounding mountains were illuminated brighter than daytime for one to two seconds, and the heat was reported as being as hot as an oven at the base camp. The observed colors of the illumination ranged from purple to green and eventually to white. The roar of the shock wave took 40 seconds to reach the observers. The shock wave was felt over 100 miles (160 km) away, and the mushroom cloud reached 7.5 miles (12.1 km) in height. After the initial euphoria of witnessing the explosion had passed, test director Kenneth Bainbridge commented to Los Alamos director J. Robert Oppenheimer, Now we are all sons of bitches. Oppenheimer later stated that, while watching the test, he was reminded of a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
(The Gadget was similar to Fat Man, which was dropped on Nagasaki on the 9th August that year. Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, was a uranium gun-trigger.)
Video of the blast is all over YouTube. Here is a short one, The Manhattan Project Trinity Test.
The best documentary I have seen on The Manhattan Project is The Day After Trinity. It is currently available on YouTube; how long that will be the case is anyone's guess. When it was filmed, several of the scientists from The Manhattan Project were still alive for interviews.
It was later determined to be an 18-to-20 kiloton explosion. (The equivalent of 18,000 tons of TNT or more) Relatively small by modern standards. Thermonuclear - or hydrogen - bombs are measured in megatons. (The largest - Tsar Bomba of the USSR - measured 50 megatons)
One of the most amazing things about the Manhattan Project was how fast the military moved once the scientists had delivered their bomb components. Hiroshima would be bombed less than a month after the Trinity Test, on August 6th, and Nagasaki 3 days after that on August 9th. Ships carrying the components left the US before they knew if the test would be a success.
The image below is of the test detonation.
Actually the Indianapolis left with the components After the test, at around 11:00 am Pacific time. the components had already been loaded. The ship apparently was ordered to go once the successful test occurred. As President Truman was in Europe at the time, it suggests he had already ordered the weapon deployed if the test worked.
ReplyDelete" near Alamogordo" I don't know why people keep saying this. Common unknowledge I guess. Alamogordo is at least 80 miles from the Trinity site. Socorro is much closer, but also much smaller.
ReplyDeleteI'm a retired AF Nuclear Weapons Specialist (463/2W2 whatever they are calling the AFSC this week). Don't know if they still do it but we used to have a tradition of celebrating July 15, Aug 6, and Aug 9th. The senior guys would fund a barbecue and pass on some unofficial history. One of the last years I was in a retired one star came to visit his son Captain Paul Tibbets at Whiteman, yeah that Tibbets. Quite an honor to meet the man and one other of the crew. That mission saved many, many lives on both sides of the war.
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