Nuclear technology the element plutonium possesses an isotope that is sufficiently unstable for this process to be usable. Terrestrial plutonium does not currently occur naturally in sufficient quantities for such use, so it must be manufactured in a nuclear reactor. Ultimately, the Manhattan Project manufactured nuclear weapons based on each of these elements. They detonated the first nuclear weapon in a test code-named "Trinity", near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The test was conducted to ensure that the implosion method of detonation would work, which it did. A uranium bomb, Little Boy, was dropped on the Japanese city Hiroshima on
Mark 36 nuclear bomb tamper-pusher which would undergo fission during the second stage fusion burn, doubling the weapon yield. Chuck Hansen wrote in Swords of Armageddon (1995) that Mark 36 nuclear bomb was produced in two yield versions, clean and dirty. He stated that clean version of Mark 36 had a yield of 6 megatons and that dirty version of Mark 36 had a design of maximum yield of 19 megatons. Mark 36 nuclear bomb The Mark 36 was a heavy high-yield United States nuclear bomb designed in the 1950s. It was a thermonuclear bomb, using a multi-stage fusion secondary system to generate yields