Trinity

At 5:30 am on 16 July 1945 the first atomic weapon was detonated at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Rang in the Jornada Del Muerte desert, New Mexico. The test was codenamed TRINITY. The resulting explosion had an energy equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT and was the largest man made explosion up to that time. Its now iconic mushroom cloud reached 7.5 miles (12.1 km) in height, and the shock wave was felt over 100 miles (160 km) away. We have lived in its shadow ever since. The test was a part of The Manhattan Project, a research and development effort to produce the first nuclear weapon during World War II. Began in 1939, The Manhattan Project employed more than 130,000 people at over 30 sites across the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada and cost nearly US $2 billion (about $357.5 billion in 2020 dollars). At the time it was the largest construction project in history, and depended on groundbreaking advances in theoretical physics along with solutions to formidable scientific challenges. All in unprecedented secrecy with no more than a few dozen people in the world knowing its true purpose, and only a thousand or so others even aware that the work was of an atomic nature. Following the success of the TRINITY test, the atomic bomb Little Boy was detonated the following month over Hiroshima on August 6, and on August 9 a second bomb Fat Man was detonated over Nagasaki. It is estimated that 200,000 people died as a result of these two detonations. For millennia we as a species have successfully killed each other at an alarming rate, but with TRINITY we gained the power to kill a thousandfold more in an instant. At this very moment hundreds of millions of people around the world are a direct target of a nuclear missile.