Trinity
The New Mexico desert, at 05:29
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The Manhattan Project was the American programme to build an atomic bomb, begun in 1942 out of fear that Germany would get there first. The Manhattan Project gathered over a hundred thousand people at sites in Tennessee, Washington and New Mexico, most of whom did not know what they were building. The project is also the origin of modern large-scale state-funded research — the model for everything from NASA to the NIH. Fallout from Trinity reached families in the Tularosa Basin who had not been warned, and who were included in the American radiation compensation scheme only in 2024.
For children
The first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945. The light was brighter than the sun, and the sand beneath fused into green glass. Three weeks later two Japanese cities were destroyed.
Sources
- Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986)
- Los Alamos National Laboratory: Trinity-testen
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