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 quickly attempted to catch up. Although the Soviet Union had detonated their RDS-6 around that same time, the RDS-6 was detonated via high powered explosives while Ivy Mike was detonated via radiation method. The Soviets then abandoned their layered cake method and focused on a two-stage bomb method. The hydrogen bomb primarily has 2 units, an atomic bomb, which was the primary unit and a secondary energy unit. The first stage of the hydrogen bomb resembled the layer cake type design, except the main difference is that the explosion is carried out by an atomic device, rather than a conventional