At 5:29 am on this day in 1945, the United States Army detonated the world’s first nuclear weapon as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was of an implosion-design plutonium bomb, or “gadget” – the same design as the Fat Man bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. Concerns about whether the complex Fat Man design would work led to a decision to conduct the first nuclear test. The code name “Trinity” was assigned by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory.At 05:29:21 MWT (11:29:21 GMT) ± 15 seconds, the device exploded with an energy equivalent to 24.8 ± 2 kilotons of TNT (103.8 ± 8.4 TJ). The desert sand, largely made of silica, melted and became a mildly radioactive light green glass, which was named trinitite. The explosion created a crater approximately 4.7 feet (1.4 m) deep and 88 yards (80 m) wide. The radius of the trinitite layer was approximately 330 yards (300 m). The 100-foot tower was completely vaporized. 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 changed from purple to green and eventually to white. The roar of the shock wave took 40 seconds to reach the observers. It was felt over 100 miles (160 km) away, and the mushroom cloud reached 7.5 miles (12.1 km) in height.
07/16/1945 Image Number: C76; 21-00003484 A-UR-06-1005 Los Alamos National Laboratory Photo by Jack Aeby)
Unfortunate juxtaposition…
Music?
SIGNS and SIGNS…
Today is the birthday, in 1941, of Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae singer-songwriter and musician Desmond Dekker who with The Aces had the 1969 UK No.1 & US No.9 single ‘Israelites’. Other hits include ‘007 (Shanty Town)’ (1967), ‘It Mek’ (1969) and ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ (1970). Dekker died of a heart attack on 25 May 2006 age 64. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-5JBhlcaa8
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