My favorite quote.
July 16th, 1945, the first nuclear bomb test, named Trinity, took place in the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. At 5:29AM, the device went off. It left a crater of radioactive glass 10 feet deep and 1100 feet wide. The shockwave was felt over 100 miles away, and the mushroom cloud reached over 7.5 miles high.
The sight was described as "The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined..."
After seeing the explosion, Kenneth Bainbridge, the test director, said to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Los Alamos director, "Now we are all sons of bitches."
Less than a month later, on August 6th (the Little Boy) and August 9th (the Fat Man) were dropped on Hiroshima, Japan and Nagasaki, Japan respectively, leading to the surrender of Japan. The only two times nuclear devices have been used in combat. The more powerful hydrogen bombs were never used in combat.
Billions, maybe trillions of dollars put into researching and creating nuclear weaponry, and only (thankfully) two were ever used in combat.
Just a little something to think about.
The sight was described as "The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined..."
After seeing the explosion, Kenneth Bainbridge, the test director, said to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Los Alamos director, "Now we are all sons of bitches."
Less than a month later, on August 6th (the Little Boy) and August 9th (the Fat Man) were dropped on Hiroshima, Japan and Nagasaki, Japan respectively, leading to the surrender of Japan. The only two times nuclear devices have been used in combat. The more powerful hydrogen bombs were never used in combat.
Billions, maybe trillions of dollars put into researching and creating nuclear weaponry, and only (thankfully) two were ever used in combat.
Just a little something to think about.