16 July 1945 - 'Trinity': world's first nuclear test On 16 July
1945, the ‘Trinity’ nuclear test plunged humanity into the so-
called Atomic Age. The first-ever nuclear bomb was detonated in
New Mexico, at the Alamogordo Test Range. Nicknamed the
“gadget”, the plutonium-based implosion-type device yielded 19
kilotons, creating a crater over 300 metres wide. U.S. efforts
to develop nuclear weapons were driven by the fear that Nazi
Germany would soon be able to do so. German chemist and Nobel
Prize laureate Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Straßmann,
helped by the Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner, had produced
the world’s first nuclear fission in late 1938. Following this
discovery, Albert Einstein sent a letter to U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning him about the threat of a German
nuclear weapons programme and urging the United States to speed
up its own efforts. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat
and exploded in a port, might well destroy the whole port with
some of the surrounding ter