Pressure hulls collapse at the speed of sound. Once that starts, you're inside your own little imploding atomic bomb, and you're gone.
Graham Hawkes |
Kenneth Bainbridge was assigned to test the bomb on March 1944. Bainbridge selected the Alamogordo Bombing Range as the testing place . Though he had planned to test it on a contained vessel to recover the left over materials, Oppenheimer later decided to forget about it since plutonium had become more available.
Named the Trinity Test, a pre-test explosion was carried out on May 7, 1945. It was the construction of a 100-ft. tower. The testing device, nicknamed "The Gadget," was raised to the top to pretend to be a bomb falling from an aircraft. On July 16, with all the impotant people present, the Gadget was successfully detonated with energy equal to around 20 kilotons of TNT. After telling the President Harry S. Truman, the team began moving to build real atomic bombs that would be then used, using the test's results. |