Fittingly, the test would take place in a desert named Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death.) The U.S. and Britain had developed 4,000 – 12,000 pound “blockbuster” bombs before – so called because they were capable of wiping out a whole city block – and made good use of them against during WW II – but this new atomic weapon was expected to be a magnitude greater. Just how much greater would be determined by the scientific instruments around the detonation site, designed to measure everything from blast waves to radiation.

On this day, July 16, in 1945, at dawn the first nuclear device was exploded at the Trinity test site at the Alamogordo Test Range, New Mexico. A brilliant flash of light illuminated the nearby mountain ranges brighter than daylight, and the temperature at the base camp, ten miles away from the explosion briefly rose to levels unbearable. In the distant sky a mushroom-shaped fireball rose up seven miles high and dissolved into a cloud.

Everyone was elated: the test had worked, and the United States realized its prediction of a supremely destructive new weapon. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who contributed most to the development of the bomb, meanwhile recalled something else entirely: one line from a passage in the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture. “If the radiance of a thousand suns  were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One … I am become Death, the shatterer of Worlds.”