Striking New Views of the First Atomic Bomb Test - Forgotten photos of the Trinity detonation show the immensity of the project

At 0.016 seconds after the atomic detonation, the fireball was already hundreds of meters wide. The tiny squares to the left and right in this image are billboards 200 meters from the center of the explosion. Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Editor’s note: If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945, is an excellent choice. That was the moment when human beings first unleashed the power of the nucleus in an immense, blinding ball of fire above a gloomy stretch of desert in the Jornada del Muerto basin in New Mexico. Emily Seyl’s Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test (The University of Chicago Press) offers hundreds of startlingly vivid photographs of the Manhattan Project that emerged from a 20-year restoration effort. This excerpt and the accompanying photos record the massive effort to capture the awesome detonation of “the Gadget.”

n the North 10,000 photography bunker, Berlyn Brixner was listening to the countdown on a loudspeaker, his head inside a turret loaded with cameras and film. He was one of the only people instructed to look toward the blast—through his welder’s glasses—ready to follow the path of the fireball as it launched into the sky. The two Mitchell movie cameras at his station would deliver the best footage to come of the Trinity test, used by Los Alamos scientists to make some of the first measurements of the effects of a nuclear explosion.

When the detonators fired, the cameras captured what Brixner could not have seen—the very first light of a violent, silent sea of energy unfurling into the basin. As 32 blocks of high explosives erupted all together, their incredible force surged inward toward the sleeping plutonium core, compressing the dense sphere of metal instantaneously from all sides and bringing its atoms impossibly close together. A carefully timed burst of neutrons sowed momentary, uncontrolled chaos, and then, as quickly as it began, the fission chain reaction ended. Footage from a high-speed Fastax camera in Brixner’s bunker, shot through a thick glass porthole, shows a translucent orb bursting through the darkness less than a hundredth of a second after detonation, as a rush of heat, light, and matter blew apart the Gadget.

When the brightness faded enough for witnesses to make out ground zero, they saw a wall of dust rise up around a brilliant, shape-shifting, multicolored ball of flames—forming a fiery cloud that shot into the sky atop a twisting stream of debris. The camera footage tells a story no less dramatic but hundreds of times more intricate, preserving the moment for scientists to return to again and again to measure and describe the behavior of the fireball and other visible effects with exacting detail. On balance, the photography effort was a huge success, despite only 11 of the 52 cameras producing satisfactory images. By arranging those cameras at intentionally staggered distances, complementary angles, and with a broad spectrum of frame rates and focal lengths, the Spectrographic and Photographic Measurements Group was able to piece together a remarkably complete picture of their subject.

According to the group’s leader, Julian Mack, the more than 100,000 frames that were captured still “give no idea of the brightness, or of time and space scales.” Mack attributed fortune, as much as foresight, to the photographic record that was made, especially during the earliest phase of the blast. Indeed, the explosion was several times more powerful than predicted, and the intensity of its effects overwhelmed many of the cameras and diagnostic instruments. The human observers were similarly overcome. “The shot was truly awe-inspiring,” said Norris Bradbury, the physicist who would succeed Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos. “Most experiences in life can be comprehended by prior experiences, but the atom bomb did not fit into any preconception possessed by anybody. The most startling feature was the intense light.”

It is a common sentiment that words and even pictures pale in comparison to the experience of the explosion. Even so, soldiers, scientists, and many other witnesses have added their firsthand accounts—often absorbing and poetic—to complement the trove of hard data collected during the test shot. They describe an intense and blinding brightness that filled the basin with daytime; an ominous, darkening cloud rearing its head in eerie silence; the wait for the invisible wave rushing out from the heart of the Gadget; and the mighty roar that arrived at last, in a thunder, and seemed never to leave. Physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi, watching from 20 miles away, remembered, “It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you.”

James Chadwick, head of the British contingent of scientists who joined the Manhattan Project, later said, “Although I had lived through this moment in my imagination many times during the past few years and everything happened almost as I had pictured it, the reality was shattering.”

And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.”

“physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.”

Peter said the same and that it would be the ‘Day of the Lord’ when it happens:

“But the Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. The earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” - 2 Peter 3:10

President Truman said the same in his diary in 1945:

“We met at 11 A.M. today. That is Stalin, Churchill and the U.S. President. But I had a most important session with Lord Montbatten & General Marshall before that. We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.” - President Truman Diary, July 25, 1945

This is long, but interesting, from a high school classmate of mine who was there.
“
In Jan, 1939,, a “Refugee of Note” arrived at the New York Harbour, and non-other than Enrico Fermi, recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Although being a Physicist, Dr. Fermi and Dad worked closely together Dr. Fermi and his wife Laura could speak very good English as did their children Guido and Nella. Dad worked with him on the Manhattan Project at Columbia and then - in l944— we traveled to Chicago where Dr. Fermi and Dad along with many other chemists and physicists set up the first chair-reaction or controlled burn as Dad would say. Dad’s job was to provide the highest grade of carbon to put the rods through to control the extent of and to control the experimental the burn rate or “chain reaction” The procedure was conducted in an old handball court at the University of Chicago. More experiments needed to be done to keeo the development of the Bomb in totally secrecy, And, the titular head being J. Robert Oppenheimer as well was General Leslie Groves. Dad said to me over the years that Oppenheimer was more poet than physicist naming the site of the first bomb site at Los Alamos named by him as “Trinity”. As a small boy I really loved living out West . Lost os scientists children, and especially Guido and Nella, the kids of Laura and Dr. Fermi. I remember the test bomb being called the “Gadget” and not a bomb which was placed on a 100 foot tower with all the scientists 7 miles distant in a trench they had built. We, my Mother, my sister Joanne, Laura, Nella and Guido, we kids were pretty -much-stuffed in the back seat but we were all just small kids. All of us had heavy dark glasses on to look through and we were 22 miles away in a little Western village named after the tall cactus. [cacti/. I believe it was July 15, 1945. The morning sun rose and it was early around 5:45 AM. Then the explosion. Our 1941 Oldsmobile, I clearly remember that it rocked back and forth many times that early morning. It was frightening to say the least. Mom was the driver that day - she was so athletic back in her early years. She and Laura knew the explosion was a success and their good reactions spread to us in the back seat. We stayed at our little shot gun shack in Los Alamos for another month and then drove back to our home in Garden City, LI, Ny. Dad worked on the Plutonium and U238 bombs, used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were “fission bombs” used in Japan less than a month later. Killing over 260 thousand Civilians... Dad and the other scientists were told that these bombs were going to be dropped on Tokyo Bay to cause a large wave - now known or referred to as a Tsunami to frighten the Japanese to settle the War. But of course this was not done. Dr. Edward Teller asked my Dad to work with him on the “fusion” or thermonuclear bomb but Dad declined to be part of that as well as a lot of other scientists declined. Dr Fermi died in 1954 with stomach cancer from radiation poisoning. We thought that my Dad died a normal death being in his 80’s, but no. When they took his blood out for a proper burial the radiation “collected” or “amplified” and heated Dad’ casket so that it “melted” and he fell out the bottom of it, and there was smoke from that but I do not know if you saw all of that. His Roentgen rating was high with his blood removed which is a measure of radiation poisoning. The Atomic Energy Commission was closed, and I was directed to call the DOD which I did. They came during the middle of the night and put a two inch lead shield from top to bottom and sides of his casket.....At death he only weighed 130 lbs. Our house for many years was an “on-going” seminar in the evenings for former scientists who were with Dad and Dr. Fermi at Columbia, Chicago and Los Alamos. Never will forget the Day, my Dad was mad at me and Mr Johns for getting a 93 in Physics. He came after school the next day and had a long talk with our physics teacher, Mr John Jasper. Dad even told him about the night the Neals Bohr, and Al Einstein came by our shot-gun shack in Alamos to play music and Einstein played his Stradivarius and my Mother played on an old op-right Piano we had bought 16 miles away in Santa Fe a few weeks before. My Mother practiced German classicals for weeks before this event for she was a concert pianist and wanted to play the German Masters that A.E. would play with her on his Stradivarius. Joanne, my wonderful sister and I were allowed to stay up late that night and listen to their splendid music, hear their laughter and to see our parents enjoying sand engaging their lives to the fullest extent.......You know my Dad and Mom [married more than 50 years] would never let me forget that night or the early mid-July morning of 1945. Guess one could say that I have
had a Full Life, and that statement would not be far from wrong. Was not as good as my Dad in Chemistry, but I loved
education and law.

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