Trinity

Abstract

At 5:29:45 am Mountain War Time, on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb, codenamed Trinity, exploded in a blinding flash 100 feet over a portion of the southern New Mexican desert known as the Jornada del Muerto – the Journey of Death – temporarily blinding a future Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman. Forty seconds after the detonation, Noble laureate Enrico Fermi dropped small pieces of paper before, during, and after the blast wave passed him. From the lateral dispersion of the paper, he calculated a yield of ten kilotons. Another laureate, I.I. Rabi, won the betting pool for Trinity’s yield. Arriving late, he bought the last available number, eighteen kilotons. The yield was later calculated to be twenty kilotons. On August 9th, a copy of the Trinity device, dubbed Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki.