Nuclear explosion debris. The first man made nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945 at 5:50 am on the Trinity Test Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico in the United States, an area now known as the White Sands Missile Range. The event involved the full-scale testing of an implosion-type fission atomic bomb. In a memorandum to the U.S. Secretary of War, General Leslie Groves describes the yield as equivalent to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. Following this test, a uranium-gun type nuclear bomb (Little Boy) was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, with a blast yield
Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb that everything flammable within a few hundred yards of ground zero vaporizes in a flash of smoke. Then suddenly the air pressure spikes. Your eyes and your lungs bulge, swell, and burst. Your eardrums explode. In a few seconds the air pressure settles back to normal, and the wind slow...and then picks up speed in the opposite direction, sucking everything inward to the churning heart of the explosion." The news of the bombing becomes worldwide. The Japanese still refuse to surrender. The US prepares to drop a bomb on the city of Kokura, but cannot because of the weather; at