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
Bomb pulse spreads through the lower atmosphere and the oceans where it is absorbed by the plants and the animals that eat the plants. The radioisotope C thus becomes part of the biosphere so that all living organisms contain a certain amount of C. Nuclear testing caused a rapid increase in atmospheric C (see figure), since the explosion of an atomic bomb also creates neutrons which collide again with N and produce C. Since the ban on nuclear testing in 1963, atmospheric C is slowly decreasing at a pace of 1% annually. This continuous decrease permits scientists to determine among others the