The first nuclear weapon was detonated in the Trinity test
On this day · 16 July 1945
Before dawn on July 16, 1945, a New Mexico desert flashed brighter than the sun as the world's first nuclear device exploded.
At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the world’s first nuclear explosion lit up the New Mexico desert. Code-named Trinity by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the test detonated a plutonium implosion device nicknamed the “Gadget” atop a 100-foot steel tower on the Alamogordo Bombing Range, about 210 miles south of Los Alamos.
The blast released roughly 18.6 kilotons of energy. It vaporized the tower outright and fused the surrounding sand and asphalt into a glassy green mineral later called trinitite. Fallout drifted across more than 1,100 square miles of New Mexico, with traces reported as far away as Canada.
Trinity proved that a plutonium bomb would work. Within weeks the United States dropped atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world entered the atomic age. The Trinity site, now within White Sands Missile Range, opens to the public only on rare designated days.
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