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
RDS-37 kiloton yield. In the spring of 1954, the US tested a series of six nuclear devices, known as Operation Castle, with each experiment being in the megaton range. The first of these was Castle Bravo, which eventually turned out as the largest detonation by the United States ever. By spring of 1954, the Soviet scientists began to understand the possibility of releasing radiation from the atomic bomb trigger and using that to initiate the fusion part of the bomb. This idea parallels the Teller-Ulam design used in the Mike explosion. They subsequently abandoned the single-stage layer cake and tube designs,