Overview

On July 16, 1945, in the desert north of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first nuclear test took place, code-named "Trinity," using a device nicknamed "the Gadget." The test released the equivalent of 19 kilotons of TNT, far mightier than any weapon ever used before.

Trinity was a test of an implosion-design plutonium device. Using the same conceptual design, the Fat Man device was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9. The Trinity detonation was equivalent to the explosion of around 20 kilotons of TNT and is usually considered the beginning of the Atomic Age.

The production of uranium-235 proved to be quite difficult with existing technology, but the production of plutonium was easier, as it was a by-product of specially constructed nuclear reactors, the first of which was developed by Enrico Fermi in 1942. The plutonium was produced on the Hanford Site in the B-Reactor, the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world. This first batch of plutonium was refined in the 221-T plant, using the bismuth phosphate process, from December 26, 1944, to February 2, 1945, and delivered to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico on February 5, 1945.

References

• Washington Nuclear Museum and Educational Center (WANMEC)
• Trinity test - wikipedia