Posted on 05/21/2026 4:59:42 AM PDT by MtnClimber
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.
[Series of 7 photographs]
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.
[Series of 6 photographs]
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.”
[Series of 4 photographs]
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.”
Do you know the thickness of the shell?
I liked the history leading up to the development of both bombs like going back to the 1700's and bringing it forward.
I forgot what it was that drew me to this thread in the first place. To take issue with that statement.
Newton remarked if that he had seen further that others it was because he'd stood on the shoulders of giants, and that's always the way with any great scientific achievement. Someone once asked Einstein if he had "stood on the shoulders of Newton," to which Einstein replied, "I stood on the shoulders of [James Clerk] Maxwell."
The Trinity bomb might still have been possible but it would have been on a alternate route and timetable if it hadn't been for the work of Ernest Rutherford, Harry Cliff, Cockcroft and Walton, et Al.
But it was the work of Hahn and Strassmann (1938) that made atomic fission the topic of conversation in literally every theoretical physics lab on the planet. Because Hahn & Strassman not only had caused an atom to split, they instrumented the event so they could prove it, they calculated the energy released in the incident, and they wrote a paper detailed enough that their tests could be replicated.
The more savvy among the physicists were most taken aback with the energy released figure because they all understood its implication in the making of a bomb of previously unimaginable power. At that moment, with that same thought entering so many pointy heads, the development of a fission bomb became inevitable. The rest was just details.
From where I sit, 16 July 1945 was the end of a beginning set into motion by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in 1938.
Thanks for posting this. I just pre-ordered a hardcover version from Amazon.
Please check back to let us know what you think.
Will do.
There supposedly was talk of a betting pool on whether or not the gadget would ignite the atmosphere of earth. Oxygen and nitrogen will combine given enough of a push or we wouldn’t have nitrous oxide. Then a logician pointed out that betting big that it wouldn’t was a sure bet because, if wrong, no one would ever collect.
Journey of Death, named by Spanish Explorers. In the summer it is a hell hole with little to no water. It can kill you.
Colonel Groves was an extraordinary man. He and his scientists, and industry were The Manhattan Project. He managed it. He knew he could not make those brillient scientists from talking about the bomb. Thus he isolated them in near luxury in the mountains of New Mexico, Los Alamos. His great scientists were mostly European Jews that fled Germany and Eastern Europe because of Hitler. The oddity of it all in WWI these same Germans were loyal citizens and loyal to the Kaiser. As loyal Germans they would have built the bomb for Hitler if they had not been persecuted by Hitler and the Third Reich.
His hatred of Jews oddly gave the weapon to the USA first and not Germany. If he had been rational he would have won WWII.
Colonel Groves was an extraordinary man. He and his scientists, and industry were The Manhattan Project. He managed it. He knew he could not make those brillient scientists from talking about the bomb. Thus he isolated them in near luxury in the mountains of New Mexico, Los Alamos. His great scientists were mostly European Jews that fled Germany and Eastern Europe because of Hitler. The oddity of it all in WWI these same Germans were loyal citizens and loyal to the Kaiser. As loyal Germans they would have built the bomb for Hitler if they had not been persecuted by Hitler and the Third Reich.
His hatred of Jews oddly gave the weapon to the USA first and not Germany. If he had been rational he would have won WWII.
His hatred of Jews oddly gave the weapon to the USA first and not Germany. If he had been rational he would have won WWII.
Unfortunately some of them were Commies, and were more than happy to let Uncle Joe have it.
Didn’t know he hated Jews.
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