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 (including those now in Kazakhstan). The uranium for the Soviet nuclear weapons program came from mine production in the following countries, RDS-1, the first Soviet atomic test was internally code-named "First Lightning" ("Первая молния", or Pervaya Molniya) August 29, 1949, and was code-named by the Americans as "Joe 1". The design was very similar to the first US "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, using a TNT/hexogen implosion lens design. On September 24, 1951, the 38.3 kiloton device RDS-2 was tested based on a tritium "boosted" uranium implosion device with a levitated core. This test was code named "Joe 2" by the