83 years have passed since the first atomic explosion, led by Oppenheimer

July 16 () –

This July 16 marks the 83rd anniversary of the Trinity testthe first explosion of a nuclear weapon, by the United States, which took place in a remote enclave of the New Mexico desert.

The detonated bomb used plutonium as fissile material.just like the one launched weeks later over Nagasaki, Japan. The first atomic bomb, the Hiroshima bomb, was made from uranium 235.

The creation of nuclear weapons was raised as a result of the growing international political tension and the scientific advances of the late 1930s. Already in the middle of World War II, the American effort became the Manhattan Project, aiming to have an atomic bomb before Hitler’s Germany.

By mid-1945, with the Nazis defeated and Japan putting up a bitter resistance that was already spreading to its national territory, this enormous investigative work had paid off.

At 052945 local time on July 16, 1945, the device exploded with an energy equivalent to 19 kilotons, equivalent to 19,000 tons of TNT. She left a crater in the desert floor 3 meters deep and 330 meters wide. At the moment of the detonation, the surrounding mountains were illuminated for one to two seconds. Observed colors of illumination ranged from purple to green, and finally to white. The boom from the explosion took 40 seconds to reach the observers and the shock wave could be felt 160 kilometers away.. The mushroom cloud reached 12 kilometers.

At 052945 local time on July 16, the device exploded with an energy equivalent to 19 kilotons, equivalent to 19,000 tons of TNT. It left a crater on the desert floor 3 meters deep and 330 meters wide. At the moment of the detonation, the surrounding mountains were illuminated for one to two seconds.. Observed colors of illumination ranged from purple to green, and finally to white. The boom from the explosion took 40 seconds to reach the observers and the shock wave could be felt 160 kilometers away. The mushroom cloud reached 12 kilometers.

The director of Los Alamos, robert oppenheimerwho observed the test, later commented that the event reminded him of a line from the famous Indian text Bhagavad Gita: “I have become death, a destroyer of worlds.”

A NEW MINERAL EMERGED

Richard Feynman claimed to be the only observer to see the explosion without dark glasses, shielding himself from the harmful ultraviolet rays only behind the glass of a truck, reports Wikipedia.

In the crater, the desert sand, composed mainly of silica, melted into a light green glass, which was called trinitite. The crater was filled in after the test, and the military reported the event as an accidental explosion in an ammunition disposal areawhich was not denied or made public until August 6, after the attack on Hiroshima.

Around 260 people witnessed the test, none within a distance of less than 9 kilometers.

The area was declared a National Historic Monument in 1975 and is accessible to the public on the first Saturday of April and October. There is still a little residual radiation at the site. The Trinity Monument, Formed by obelisk-shaped dark, rough rock about 3.6 meters high, it marks the hypocenter of the explosion.