Mankind become Death and Destroyer of Worlds: The Trinity Atomic Bomb Test of July 16,1945

 J. Robert Oppenheimer the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project codenamed the test “Trinity” after a sonnet by Elizabethan poet John Donne--Holy Sonnet 14--famed for these lines:

Batter my heart, three personed God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend

That I may rise, and stand o’erthrow me and bend

Your force to break , blow, burn and make me new….

A fitting and prophetic poem, indeed, for what the gathered scientists, military personnel and unwitting civilians in the desolate New Mexico desert witnessed on that July day in 1945--the destructive power of God harnessed by man for the first time in human history.

The Trinity Test--the first successful detonation in history of a nuclear device on the planet earth--took place at exactly 5:29 in the morning Mountain Time, only moments after sunrise, on July 16, 1945.  It was the penultimate achievement of the Manhattan Project, which thousands of individuals had worked on so diligently at the cost of billions of dollars for over three years--and arguably it was one of the darkest chapters in the history of mankind.

Officially, four hundred and twenty-five people--mostly scientists--were gathered in the New Mexico desert to witness Trinity and to analyze the results of the explosion.  Many who had worked so hard to make Trinity a reality feared a “fizzle” or the lack of an explosion and simply the burning off of hazardous radioactive uranium that could have potentially contaminated the air and earth for hundreds of miles around and would have been a waste of much of the world’s only supply of refined uranium--that had cost the United States government billions of dollars to produce.  

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Surprisingly, though, despite the fears of the scientists the Trinity Test was conducted a mere twenty-five miles from the town of Socorro, New Mexico a thriving community of over eight-thousand civilians and home since the 1880’s to the New Mexico School of Mining and Technology one of the southwest’s most prestigious trade schools.

Technically, the test was conducted in what today is a National Park--the White Sands National Park--though during World War Two the site of the world’s first nuclear blast was known as the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, but then to protect the secrecy of the Manhattan Project and its mission to develop the world’s first atomic bomb, it was later renamed the White Sands Proving Ground just prior to the Trinity Test in 1945.

The idea of testing a nuclear bomb had first come about in early 1944.  At that time, and at the cost of billions of dollars the scientists of the Manhattan Project had spent two years obtaining and refining uranium and later also plutonium.  At first, because of the cost involved in producing the world’s first atomic bomb, government leaders in the United States, particularly General Leslie Groves the military head of the Manhattan Project were hesitant to approve any kind of test explosion of a nuclear bomb, considering how expensive it was to potentially waste so much rare and costly refined material, but Oppenheimer was relentless and argued that, “The bomb must be tested in a range where the energy release is comparable with that contemplated for its final use.”

In other words, we had to set off an A-bomb in the United States first, specifically in the New Mexico desert to find out what would happen when we dropped it on either a German or a Japanese city before the end of World War Two.  With the encouragement of the scientific community that had run the Manhattan Project, and out of a morbid sort of scientific curiosity to see what would happen when a nuclear bomb did actually go off, the idea for the Trinity Test was born.

In spite of how desolate and inhospitable the desert landscape of parts of New Mexico can appear, it is interesting to note that in July of 1945 nearly half a million civilians lived within one-hundred fifty miles of the Trinity Test site.  It’s also interesting to note that after the Trinity Test and after the scientific community gained a greater appreciation for the destructive and insidious nature of the radioactive fallout from nuclear explosions, the Manhattan Project’s Chief Medical Officer Colonel Stafford L. Warren recommended that all future nuclear bomb tests be conducted at least one-hundred and fifty miles away from any populated areas.

Obelisk and Plaque marking the site of the Trinity Test today

In the days and weeks leading up to the Trinity Test those in the military scientific community were literally taking bets on if the bomb would split the core of the earth, make a large section of the United States completely uninhabitable or simply fizzle out and not work at all.  Though much testing had been done in controlled environments, and though countless hours of hypothetical scenarios had been run--what would actually happen as the result of a nuclear explosion still remained largely a mystery prior to Trinity.

July 16, 1945--the bomb, codenamed “gadget” for secrecy and some scientific laughs--was in place atop a one-hundred foot high test tower and ready for detonation.  Initially detonation was scheduled for four in the morning--just prior to sunrise in the summertime in the desert--but rain and strong winds forced a delay.  Oddly enough two B-29 superfortresses--the same aircraft that would eventually drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War Two, killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese and ushered in the atomic age--circled high above the detonation tower, not as weapons of war but as scientific observation planes.

The skies cleared and at exactly 5:29 and twenty-one seconds in the morning the first nuclear explosion in human history unleashed the explosive force of 21,000 tons of TNT and turned a half mile wide swath of desert sand instantly to glass.

The 100 foot tower erected just for the test explosion was vaporized in an instant.  Shockwaves from the explosion were felt over one-hundred miles away from the test site and observers watching through shaded goggles from a mile away reported that for a few seconds, “the air was hot as an oven.”  People in New Mexico for miles around reported seeing a rainbow of colors flashing across the horizon from purple, to blue, to green, to orange and a mushroom cloud of smoke reached nearly eight miles high into the sky.

Crater caused by Trinity Test

In the moments after detonation it seems as if most everyone was mesmerized by the light--an unearthly light the likes of which had never been glimpsed by man.

Joan Hinton a renowned nuclear physicist, one of the few women who worked directly on the development of the atomic bomb for the Manhattan Project, and one of only two female observers of the Trinity Test said that, “It was like being at the bottom of an ocean of light.  We were bathed in it from all directions.  Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up.”  

Ms. Hinton went on to say of the sound that, “Then suddenly, the sound reached us.  It was very sharp and loud and rumbled and all the mountains rumbled with it.  We suddenly started talking out loud and felt exposed to the whole world.”

Less than a month later Joan Hinton was horrified and shocked to learn, after having been so traumatized from witnessing the Trinity Test, that the United States actually dared to drop two atomic bombs on Japan.  After the war she stopped working for the United States government and in 1949 defected from the United States and moved to China in protest over America’s use and development of nuclear weapons.  She would live until 2010, passing away in Beijing at the age of 88 years--she never returned to the United States again.

Ms. Hinton may have been shocked by the destructive power and force of what she saw, but most of the scientists gathered at Alamogordo to witness Trinity were nearly overcome with joy simply to see that the bomb actually worked!

Physicist Joan Hinton in 1945

New York Times correspondent and science journalist William L. Laurance--who was employed by the Manhattan Project as a sort of public relations spokesperson and who was the only civilian reporter to witness the Trinity Test--said of the scientists’ reaction in the wake of the explosion, “A loud cry filled the air.  The little groups that hitherto had stood rooted to the earth like desert plants, broke into dance--the rhythm of primitive man dancing at one of his fire festivals at the coming of Spring.”

Officially, on the day after the test the United States government issued a press release that stated that an ammunition dump containing a large quantity of TNT had exploded at the Alomagordo proving ground that caused the loud explosion, blinding light and rumbling earthquake that was felt throughout New Mexico.  This press release was sent out to every major newspaper and media outlet in America  to try and assuage suspicion over what had happened and was dutifully reported as fact by everyone in the press at the time.

Less than three full weeks later on August 6, 1945 an atomic bomb--exactly like that tested in the New Mexico desert during Trinity--was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, destroying the city and killing upwards of 150,000 people in nearly an instant.  Three days later a second bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki with an equally devastating effect--and a week later World War Two was over and mankind has been on the brink of destruction ever since.

Tower with "Gadget" just prior to Trinity

Oddly enough, after the successful Trinity Test in July of 1945, when asked his thoughts about what he witnessed, J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted from one of humanity’s most ancient spiritual texts--the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita:

“Now I am become Death; the Destroyer of Worlds.”