XBradTC

71 years ago, in the desert of southwestern New Mexico, at 5:29:21AM, Mountain War Time, a blinding flash lit the sky, and for the first time, the power of an atomic explosion was unleashed upon the world. The scientists of the Manhattan project were so confident that the gun type uranium bomb they were developing would work that no test was required. But the far more complex implosion type plutonium weapon was another story. And so a tower 100 feet high was built, and the exorbitantly expensive “Gadget” was installed atop on an oak platform.

The blast yielded the equivalent of about 20 kilotons of TNT, and left a crater in the desert five feet deep, and about 30 feet across.