The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying. No manmade phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before.
—Gen. Thomas Farrell, eyewitness at the Trinity test, writing the day afterwards
Manhattan Project scientists and engineers were confident the gun-type uranium bomb would work. They were less sure of the more complicated implosion-type plutonium bomb. In 1944, Project leadership began planning for a full-scale test of the latter, with physicist Kenneth Bainbridge in charge.
Bainbridge selected a remote, sparsely populated desert near Alamogordo, 220 miles south of Los Alamos, as the site codenamed “Trinity.” The Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, in the Jornada del Muerto desert, was 35 miles southeast of Socorro. Historians are uncertain exactly how the codename Trinity was selected, but after the fact, Los Alamos Laboratory Director J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote that he may have been inspired by the poetry of John Donne.
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Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you |
The military began work at Trinity Site in December of 1944. The pace of preparations quickened in the spring of 1945, soon reaching a fever pitch. By the summer the Project raced to complete the test in time to strengthen President Truman’s hand in negotiations with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin over postwar Europe at the Potsdam Conference in July.
Hundreds of people, soldiers and civilians, worked in secret in the desert. Test explosions, not involving nuclear materials, began in May. Early in the morning on July 13, couriers drove a U.S. Army sedan from Los Alamos to the test site, carrying the explosives assembly for the Trinity Test in the back seat. Scientists and engineers assembled the test device on site at Trinity. |
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Four platoons of soldiers stood ready to evacuate nearby residents if the winds threatened to carry fallout over their homes. No evacuations were deemed necessary, but a few days after the test local ranchers found white splotches on the hides of some of their cows, likely caused by radioactive dust.
Some families in Los Alamos were told to wake up early and look south on the morning of the test. From houses, or wrapped in blankets up on the mountainside, they saw what looked like the light of a sunrise. Most did not know that they were witnessing the light of the dawn of the atomic age.
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Voices of the Manhattan Project is a joint project by the Atomic Heritage Foundation and the Los Alamos Historical Society to collect oral histories from Manhattan Project veterans and their family members to create a public archive of first-hand accounts of the Manhattan Project.
![]() Jack Aeby's 35mm Perfex Forty-Four camera on display in the Los Alamos History Museum. Aeby used this camera to take the only color published photo of the Trinity Test. On the orange block beside the camera is a bit of firing cable used for the test, and behind it is a piece of glass used in an observation bunker.
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