July 16, 1945. The Trinity Test
Prior to World War II scientists around the world were beginning to explore the possibility of splitting the atom to acquire a bomb of unknown but by all accounts unbelievable power. When evidence emerged that the Germans were ahead of the rest of the world in such research President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the Manhattan Project, a crash program to ensure that the United States acquired such a weapon ahead of its enemies.
The weapons development program was centered in Los Alamos New Mexico, under the control of the US Army. As the scientists, engineers, technicians, and support personnel drew closer to the development of a workable atomic bomb the war in Europe and the Pacific ground on.
By July 1945 the group at Los Alamos was nearing the opportunity to test a weapon. By then the Germans had surrendered, and many today believe that the bomb was no longer necessary, since Japanese research into the matter was negligible. This attitude ignores history. The program had developed its own momentum and detonating a weapon had become almost inevitable. The war with Japan appeared to be unending, given the growing ferocity of Japanese resistance throughout the Pacific. American troops who had survived the brutal war in Europe faced the grim prospect of dying in Japan. The Soviet Army was poised in Germany, clearly not intending to withdraw from any of the lands it had overrun on its drive west.
The bomb used for the Trinity Test was similar in design to that which would be dropped on Nagasaki Japan one month later. When it detonated – the first atomic explosion since creation – it immediately made the United States the indisputable most powerful nation on earth. The following month two bombs were dropped on Japan and the world was awakened to the horrors of nuclear war. It has lived under its shadow ever since.
After surviving a Cold War in which the two superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – faced mutual assured destruction, the world now lives with the fear of rogue states such as North Korea or Iran triggering a nuclear holocaust. The fear of terrorists getting their bloodied hands on such devices looms as well. America had to finish the bomb simply because its enemies would have and did. Trinity led to the end of World War II and made the world a much more frightening place in the process.