JAKARTA - On July 16, 1945, for the first time a nuclear explosion occurred. Derived from the test of a nuclear weapon that has the code 'Trinity', the explosion took humanity to the Atomic Age.
The nuclear bomb was detonated in New Mexico, United States (US) and was based on plutonium. The explosion produced 19 kilotons, creating a 300-meter-wide crater in the blast area.
Citing the official website of the US Department of Energy, the Trinity blasting area was part of the White Sands Missile Range. It is a military testing area and is owned by the US Department of Defense.
There were signs of ground pressure, which showed how powerful the explosion was. There are also remnants of the base camp, where some 200 scientists, soldiers, and technicians lived temporarily during the summer of 1945.
The Trinity site is currently opened to the public by the National Park Service twice a year. Tours are provided by DOD upon request.
Insecurity from the NazisUS efforts to develop nuclear weapons were fueled by fears that Nazi Germany would soon do so. German chemist and Nobel laureate Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Straßmann produced the world's first nuclear fission in late 1938.
In that effort they were assisted by Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner. After this discovery Albert Einstein wrote to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein warned of the threat of Germany's nuclear weapons program and urged the US to accelerate its own efforts.
"A single bomb of this type, carried on a ship and exploded in a port, might destroy the entire port and some of the area around it," Albert Einstein told US President Roosevelt in the letter, citing the CTBTO's official website.
Germany has indeed carried out nuclear research. But only a handful of scientists were assigned to carry out such research. Their efforts were largely unsuccessful and were scaled back after 1942.
US, on the other hand. They invested essentially unlimited manpower and industrial resources into the Manhattan Project, which began in 1942. Robert Oppenheimer led the project as chief scientific officer of six thousand scientists at Los Alamos.
Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Three weeks after testing, August 6 and 9, 1945 to be exact, nuclear bombs, which had a design basis, such as the Trinity were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The explosion killed tens of thousands of civilians. For those who manage to live, they will not escape radiation exposure.
Trinity is the first, after more than two thousand nuclear tests worldwide. One thousand of them are US nuclear test programs. Nuclear tests release large amounts of radioactivity around the world.
The tests also spurred the proliferation of nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the earliest prototypes. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) prohibits any form of nuclear testing.
The US was the first country to sign it when it opened for signature on September 24, 1996. But the US is also one of eight countries that still have to ratify the CTBT before it takes effect. The others are China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel and Pakistan.
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