16 Jul 2005. United States exploded first atom bomb 60 years ago

Trinity repercussions still felt

16 Jul 2005. LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO. In a year packed with 60th anniversaries of WWII milestones, the first-ever nuclear explosion, code-named "Trinity," stands out as the beginning of the end of the war in Japan and as a convenient focus for a host of issues in the news.

The anniversary of the atom bomb blast at the Ground Zero of 16 Jul 1945 in the New Mexico desert will bring a crowd of visitors to the lava stone obelisk marking the Trinity site, and invites a fresh look at the Manhattan project that built the A-bomb. Spying and security scandals at the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratories link the Trinity blast to the recent past and present – and to the troubled treaties designed to reduce the threat of nuclear annihilation and limit testing, and to a proposed new generation of weapons proposed by the Republican administration of George W. Bush.

On 16 Jul 1945 the Fat Man plutonium bomb was mounted at the top of a 100-ft tower at Ground Zero on the Trinity test site. Just before 0530, a web of detonators began a reaction that has been likened to the state of the universe moments after its primordial explosion. The explosive power was equivalent to 18.6 kilotons of TNT. A mushroom cloud of churning purple and green flames rose high above Ground Zero and grew to a height of over 5 miles. Less than one month later the United States dropped its new fearsome weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered.

The United States inaugurated the multi-billion-dollar program in 1942 to make an atom bomb before Germany. Named the Manhattan Project, it built on discoveries about atomic particles and behavior by James Chadwick and Enrico Fermi and on the first blueprints for a nuclear bomb from Britain in 1941. The actual construction of the bomb began at the Los Alamos lab under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer. <snip>

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