At 5:29, on the morning of July 16, 1945, a fireplace shone the desert of New Mexico: The highly confidential Manhattan of the US Army attributed his fruits, with Professor Robert Oppenheimer’s team holding the first nuclear explosion of history with bomb «Gadget».
Just 1 kg of plutonium was enough to release energy corresponding to 20,000 tonnes of TNTs, that is, nearly 2,000 World War II bombs, creating a 300 -meter -diameter fiery bullet and a 12km tobacco mushroom.
This explosion has violently marked the entry of mankind into the nuclear era.
Three weeks later, on August 6, the “Enola Gay” aircraft dropped the first atomic “Little Boy” bomb in Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people. The Nagasaki destruction followed on August 9 with the “Fat Man” bomb, which caused the deaths of 74,000 people.
Following the Trinity test, Oppenheimer said: “Now I am the death, the destroyer of the world”, an excerpt from Bhagavad Gita, Hindu sacred text with 700 verses.
A phrase that remained in history as the manifesto of the nuclear era – of the era where man conquered the power of the individual, an almost divine power, but capable of leading to his self -destruction.