75 years ago today, the Trinity Test takes place in New Mexico

[bronxiteforever]

Photographed 75 years ago today in New Mexico, the first detonation of a nuclear device, code named Trinity, took place in the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man) desert. Lead Physicist Robert Oppenheimer thought of the Hindu god Vishnu, who upon taking on his multi-armed form, says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”


https://thebulletin.org/2020/07/in-their-own-words-trinity-at-75/#

[Docreed2003]

1. And three weeks later

The first atomic weapon would be dropped as a weapon of war.

[bronxiteforever]

3. +1 I am reading a book about the Titanic

and I have been struck over the media coverage of the ship sinking and the horror of the loss of 1500 people in 1912 and then I contrast nuclear weapons just 33 years later along with millions upon millions dead in world wars, civil wars, genocides, holocaust, famines and pandemics(1918).

[NNadir]

5. And three days after that, the last atomic weapon was dropped as a weapon of war.

It's funny, of course, since oil wars and oil based weapons of mass destruction have destroyed orders of magnitude more people than nuclear wars, including the war that was the only nuclear war ever observed, the World War II oil war - and it was very much an oil war at least inasmuch it involved the Japanese and the Americans and the Germans and the Soviets.

Do we worry about oil based weapons of mass destruction? We don't. We build and use them happily, year after year after year, decade after decade, but we are willing to completely destroy the planetary atmosphere because we worry about nuclear wars that do not happen.

It would be an interesting and different world if we focused as much on what is happening rather than what could happen in our wild nightmares.

[Shermann]

6. Interestingly, using a uranium bomb instead of the plutonium bomb tested at Trinity

They wanted to ensure sure they could quickly make more if they had to.

[hunter]

7. Uranium bombs were horrors from a munitions safety standpoint, and they were horribly expensive.

Plutonium bombs can be mass produced, they cost less than uranium bombs, and they are not likely to go off by accident which has been proven multiple times in airplane crashes, forklift accidents, missile explosions, and the like.

Plutonium can be made by the ton from natural uranium without the huge inputs of electrical power the purification of U-235 requires.

By 1950 the U.S.A. had more than a hundred "fat man" type plutonium bombs of the sort dropped on Nagasaki and these were already obsolete and being replaced by more sophisticated plutonium bombs.

The plutonium production reactors at Hanford were built big.

Plutonium bombs were designed from the start to be mass produced and they continued to be mass produced after World War II ended.

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was already obsolete.

[Best_man23]

2. The actual quote from Oppenheimer

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. I just finished reading

The Oppenheimer Alternative by J. Robert Sawyer. It's a science fiction novel, no more accurately a historical novel with a bit of a science fiction twist. It's about Oppie and the Manhattan Project has every important physicist of that era are in it. Excellent book.

[bobbieinok]

8. In 40s, 50s, when I was a kid, newsreels at movies often showed atomic tests

Those atomic tests and the cartoons are what I most remember about going to the movies when I was a kid

[hunter]

9. My father-in-law witnessed an atomic test up close.

The military wanted to see how soldiers would perform on an atomic battlefield.

They marched across the desert toward ground zero, stuff still burning around them.

When the exercise was done they discarded their uniforms and showered. If they didn't pass a quick scan with the Geiger counter, they showered some more.

A lot of these guys died earlier than they should have because of the radiation exposure. My father-in-law got lucky.

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/590299/atomic-soldiers/

[bobbieinok]

10. Remember govt did that several times. Govt very careless with its soldiers' lives!!

Govt, military treated them as nothing more than guinea pigs!

[hunter]

11. And they didn't talk about it...

My father-in-law didn't, years after the "oath of secrecy" was rescinded by Bill Clinton.

Nobody knew.