Trinity

At 05:30 mountain time on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb test occurred at Los Alamos, NM. The "gadget", as it was called, exploded with the force of 20 kilotons of TNT. It was an implosion-design plutonium bomb, of the kind dropped within a month upon Nagasaki: shock waves from explosives were focused toward the solid plutonium core to release the strong force that binds atomic nuclei. Costing the 2023 equivalent of $27 billion, the Manhattan Project was led by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer. The code name for the detonation, Trinity, is attributed to Oppenheimer who was inspired by a line from a John Donne poem, "Batter my heart, three person'd God." After the celebration that the "gadget" hadn't been a dud, as many had feared, one physicist told Oppenheimer, "Now we are all sons of bitches."

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