“The glass takes strange shapes-lopsided marbles, knobbly sheets a quarter-inch thick, broken, thin-walled bubbles, green, wormlike forms.” (Today, several samples of the substance, including the ones pictured here, reside at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.) At first no one knew what to call the material. “A lake of green jade,” Time magazine described it in September 1945. No one commented on the glass at the time-its creation was the least of the Gadget’s spectacular effects-but visitors to the site after the war noticed the unusual scattering of glassy mineral that surrounded the shallow bomb crater and began collecting pieces as souvenirs. The 100-million-degree fireball vaporized the steel tower down to its footings, swirled up desert sand, melted it and rained down splashes of greenish glass before rising rapidly to form the world’s first nuclear mushroom cloud. The rain stopped and just at dawn on July 16, 1945, the explosion delivered a multiplying nuclear chain reaction in a sphere of plutonium no larger than a baseball that yielded an explosive force equivalent to about 19,000 tons of TNT. Physicist Norris Bradbury, group leader for bomb assembly, stands next to the partially assembled Gadget atop the test tower. There they hoisted it into a corrugated-steel shelter on a 100-foot steel tower, connected the tangle of electric cables that would detonate its shell of high explosives, and waited tensely through a night of lightning and heavy rain before retreating to a blockhouse five and a half miles away to begin the test countdown. In mid-July 1945, American scientists had trucked the five-ton mechanism from their secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, 230 miles south, to a place known to the scientists as Trinity in a stretch of southern New Mexico desert called the Jornada del Muerto-the journey of death. The first atomic bomb ever exploded was a test device, insouciantly nicknamed the Gadget.
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