Trinity nuclear test
Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2013 9:22 pmTrinity (nuclear test)
With the ultimate weapon in its hands the United States joined in the Potsdam Declaration 10 days later, demanding Japan's surrender.
After another 10 days failed to produce a surrender the United Stated bombed Hiroshima.
Many people don't know that the United States planned to drop two nuclear bombs every month until Japan surrendered. We had enough built to last through December.
Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear device, conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945 as a result of the Manhattan Project, in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, at the new White Sands Proving Ground, which incorporated the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. (The site is now the White Sands Missile Range.) Trinity used an implosion-design plutonium device, informally nicknamed "The Gadget". Using the same conceptual design, the Fat Man device was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. The Trinity detonation produced the explosive power of about 20 kilotons of TNT (84 TJ) ...
At 05:29:21 (plus or minus 2 seconds) local time (Mountain War Time), the device exploded with an energy equivalent to around 20 kilotons of TNT (84 TJ). 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 ..."
With the ultimate weapon in its hands the United States joined in the Potsdam Declaration 10 days later, demanding Japan's surrender.
After another 10 days failed to produce a surrender the United Stated bombed Hiroshima.
Many people don't know that the United States planned to drop two nuclear bombs every month until Japan surrendered. We had enough built to last through December.
