Bomb site
These previously classified photos and documents reveal the scientific work that went into the world's first atomic test in the New Mexico desert in 1945 – a test that, just weeks later, would see nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan
This article contains images that some readers may find disturbing.
Photographs provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory
Words by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
Bomb site
These previously classified photos and documents reveal the scientific work that went into the world's first atomic test in the New Mexico desert in 1945 – a test that, just weeks later, would see nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan
This article contains images that some readers may find disturbing.
Photographs provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory
Words by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
This 1881 US Geological Survey map depicts the Jornada del Muerto desert, where the atomic test took place.
Provided by Fray Angélico Chavez History Library/New Mexico History Museum
On 16 July 1945, in a remote part of the New Mexico desert, a team of researchers and military personnel witnessed the moment when humanity’s relationship with nature changed forever: when the energy of the atom was harnessed for devastating destruction for the first time.
The operation was code-named Trinity. This was the final test of the technology behind the atomic bombs that the US used against Japan only 21 days later, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Through several hundred previously classified photographs and documents, Emily Seyl’s (The University of Chicago Press) tells the story of the human and scientific efforts that led to humanity commandeering the atom’s power.
The nuclear bomb, which was nicknamed the “Gadget,” was placed on top of a 30-metre steel tower to emulate being dropped from a plane and detonated while falling. The detonators were fired around 5:29 am, setting off explosives placed around the Gadget’s plutonium core. The force of these explosions tremendously compressed the plutonium, getting its nuclei ready for a chain reaction.
“A carefully timed burst of neutrons sowed momentary, uncontrolled chaos,” writes Seyl, describing that fission reaction and the blinding explosion that followed. “When the brightness faded enough for witnesses to make out ground zero, they saw a wall of dust rise up around a brilliant, shape-shifting, multicolored ball of flames – forming a fiery cloud that shot into the sky atop a twisting stream of debris.”
The explosion was equivalent to almost 25,000 tons of TNT. The steel tower essentially evaporated and the shockwave from the blast was felt as far as 160 kilometres from the test site. Where the Gadget and the tower once stood was now a crater about 335 metres across and nearly 3 metres at it deepest. The power of the atom burned many times brighter than the sun, and it left pure destruction in its wake.
This 1881 US Geological Survey map depicts the Jornada del Muerto desert, where the atomic test took place.
Provided by Fray Angélico Chavez History Library/New Mexico History Museum
Trinity was so unprecedented that the researchers behind it barely knew what to expect, but they still had to measure and analyse nearly everything. This image shows a large balloon that was used to measure gamma rays emitted by the atomic blast.
Here, a photograph depicts welder’s goggles, which were the team’s best guess at protecting their eyes from the explosion’s brightness.
Photo by David Woodfin
Here, a researcher is shown stringing up a helium balloon equipped with “shock switches” that would produce flashes of light when hit by the explosion’s otherwise invisible shockwave. By photographing a sequence of such flashes, the researchers hoped to trace the shockwave’s front.
Seyl says photography was always an integral part of the Trinity test: it wasn’t just a documentation of the event, but one of its many measurements. The research team included TR-5, a dedicated spectrographic and photographic measurements group that experimented and innovated with contemporary cameras. Some were placed in boxes outfitted with intricate mirror systems, for example, so that overly intense light would enter them as a reflection, rather than directly.
Even with such precautions, most of the cameras failed and the only colour photograph, shown to the right, was taken by one of the soldiers who was also a hobby photographer. “He closed his eyes and just started clicking when the bomb went off, and that's what we ended up with,” says Seyl.
These next images show one object that survived the explosion: a colossally large steel container called Jumbo, designed to encase the Gadget.
Jumbo was never used for its intended purpose. Its incredible stature is made clear in images of its transport by caterpillar tractors, which Seyl says are some of her favourites.
Photo by Jack Aeby
Photo by Jack Aeby
Photo by Jack Aeby
Photo by Jack Aeby
Photographer: Ernest D. Wallis
Photographer: Ernest D. Wallis
Photographer: Ernest D. Wallis
Photographer: Ernest D. Wallis
This is a procedure document laying out the final preparations for the test.
The early moments of the nuclear blast can be seen in the stark black-and-white photograph below. The otherworldly, translucent orb of heat and light is surrounded by a dust “skirt” and a shockwave “belt”.
In Trinity, Seyl notes that physicist Isidor Rabi, who was part of the project and watched from twenty miles away, said that: “It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you.” For most, these images, taken from a faraway photography bunker, will be as close as they can get to understanding the experience. They were also some of the first data that Trinity’s scientists obtained for estimating the scale and power of the explosion, which exceeded many predictions.
“It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you”
This is an aerial view of the crater caused by the test.
The crater is around 335 metres across and nearly 3 metres at its deepest.
Seyl says the Trinity test is as much a human story as it is one of scientific achievement and wartime devastation. One of the members of TR-5 was a commercial photographer who shot many artistic and candid photographs that show the personalities and relationships underpinning the work, with researchers and military personnel working around the clock, unsure of whether they would succeed until the very last moment. “A lot of these people were used to being in a laboratory, not being in the barren desert, right? There had to be camaraderie between all of them, and just a sense of melding of the work with what your life is in that moment. That certainly comes through in the photos,” says Seyl.
Chemist Donald Hornig guards the Trinity atom bomb at the top of the 30-metre tower where it was deployed, looking small and hemmed-in by the spherical colossus of wires and metal.
Herbert Lehr, a member of the US Army’s Special Engineer Detachment, holds the case with the plutonium core that was key fuel for the bomb. Slim, in a white shirt and slacks, he lingers in the doorway of a clean room, eyes focused on something besides the camera.
A declassified blueprint of “Fat Man”, the weaponised version of the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on 9 August 1945.
A declassified blueprint of “Fat Man”, the weaponised version of the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on 9 August 1945.
General Leslie Groves, the man in charge of the US programme to create nuclear weaponry, looks at a map of Japan.
General Leslie Groves, the man in charge of the US programme to create nuclear weaponry, looks at a map of Japan.
The ruins of Hiroshima in the wake of the Little Boy bomb, taken on March 1946
The ruins of Hiroshima in the wake of the Little Boy bomb, taken on March 1946
The legacy of the Trinity test is primarily one of tragedy. It led to a devastating loss of life just a few weeks later.
The bomb "Little Boy" caused devastation in Hiroshima, Japan, when it was dropped on 6 August. Little Boy was smaller in yield than the bomb tested in Trinity, but caused catastrophic death and destruction, exposing the city’s residents to searing heat, secondary fires, shockwaves that tore down buildings and the invisible effects of radiation. Nagasaki experienced the same nightmare, and by the late 1970s, it was estimated that in 1945 alone, 70,000 people died in Nagasaki and about 140,000 in Hiroshima. These figures have only continued to increase since.
Some of the tragedy of the Trinity test lies in it also being a scientific undertaking of singular scope, an achievement that would have been celebrated as a scientific breakthrough were it not in the service of killing. Trinity meticulously illustrates just how many people and resources it required. Seyl says she intended her book to be an immersive experience that could help readers understand the test’s history and intricacies better, helping them build a foundation for thinking about nuclear weapons now. Today, nine states across the world are understood to possess nuclear weapons.
“Knowledge is so empowering and so necessary,” she says. “[The book] really can prepare you to study further and understand more and interest people in developing their own viewpoint.”
The Trinity test changed everything, and we live in that changed world now.