At 5:29 a.m. in the Jornada del Muerto desert, physicists watched a plutonium device unleash a fireball brighter than the sun, vaporizing the steel tower that held it and fusing the desert sand into a glassy green mineral later named trinitite. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project's scientific team, later said the test brought to mind a line from the Bhagavad Gita: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Three weeks later, the bomb's descendants fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The test, code-named Trinity, took place before dawn on a stretch of desert so desolate the Spanish had named it 'Journey of the Dead Man.' Scientists and generals watched from bunkers miles away, some wearing welder's goggles, others simply lying face down with their feet toward the blast. The explosion, equivalent to about 20,000 tons of TNT, produced a flash visible from 160 miles away and a mushroom cloud that rose 7.5 miles into the sky.
Enrico Fermi, ever the experimentalist, dropped scraps of paper as the shock wave passed to estimate the yield from how far they blew. Physicist Isidor Rabi recalled a strange, sourceless silence gripping the observers afterward, broken only when someone whispered that it had worked. Oppenheimer's brother Frank remembered him simply saying, 'It worked.'
The test's success set in motion the final, terrible phase of the Second World War. Within a month, President Truman authorized the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing well over 100,000 people and forcing Japan's surrender. The desert site, now a National Historic Landmark, is open to visitors twice a year, where Geiger counters still click faintly over the fused, glassy sand.