July 16th, 1945: At 5:29am MDT (UTC-6), the United States Army detonates the world’s first nuclear weapon.
The test was named “Trinity” by director J. Robert Oppenheimer. It occurred at the Alamogordo Range in New Mexico, USA. The device was an implosion-based plutonium device, the same as the “Fat Man” bomb that would later be detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, and had a yield equivalent to 25 kilotons of TNT.
The location of the test was away from dense, urban areas. Despite this, there were 19,000 people nearby, including several Native American tribes and pueblos.
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