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
Soviet atomic bomb project control of the atomic bomb project by establishing a special committee to oversee the development of nuclear weapons as soon as possible. On 9 April 1946, the Council of Ministers created KB–11 ('Design Bureau-11) that worked towards mapping the first nuclear weapon design, primarily based on American approach and detonated with weapon-grade plutonium. From this point, the work on the program was carried out quickly, resulting in the first nuclear reactor near Moscow on 25 October 1946. From 1941–46, the Soviet Union's Ministry of Foreign Affairs handled the logistics of the atomic bomb project, with Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov controlling