The Gadget

July 15th, 1945, "The Gadget" was detonated.
Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, as a result of the Manhattan Project. The new test site, named the White Sands Proving Ground. The Trinity detonation produced the explosive power of about 20 kilotons of TNT.
Funny thing about the first test...some scientists felt strongly that there remained a possibility that Trinity might "ignite" the earth's atmosphere, eliminating all life on the planet, although calculations had determined this was "unlikely"
Until someone pressed the button, nobody knew for sure...
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The observers even set up a betting pool on the results of the test, with predictions ranging from zero (a complete dud) to 45 kilotons of TNT. Physicist I. I. Rabi won the pool with a prediction of 18 kilotons of TNT
Congrats I.I. Rabi, and thankfully the "unlikely" but theoretically possible instantaneous planetary wide combustion of the earth atmosphere did not occur...so we guess we all won that bet!
In 1939 a letter was sent by prominent physicists Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning of the possibility that Nazi Germany might be attempting to build an atomic bomb.
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In 1942, Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project, as the American nuclear physics effort was called, to research and develop a nuclear device. Although Nazi Germany was defeated in May 1945, the Manhattan Project was not disbanded. The two remaining devices were used over Hiroshima and Nagasaki a short time later, and were credited with avoiding the necessity of a land invasion of the Japanese mainland.

 

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