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Event

Trinity test

A mushroom cloud rises from a silhouetted structure against an orange sky, depicting the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.

The first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the Manhattan Project at 5:29 a.m. on 16 July 1945 in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico. The device, nicknamed the Gadget, used a plutonium core compressed inward by shaped chemical explosives and released the equivalent of about twenty-one kilotons of TNT. Robert Oppenheimer, watching from base camp ten miles away, later recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita.

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