And this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.' It's often said that physicists became so intent on the intellectual challenge of building an atomic bomb that they lost sight of the profound implications of what they were creating. Hans Bethe famously observed, 'The physicists have known sin. 'It's a terrible thing that we made,' Feynman remembered him saying. The heat from the explosion melted the sandy soil around the tower into a mildly radioactive glassy crust now known as 'trinitite.' And the shock wave broke windows as far as 120 miles away.Īfter the Trinity test, Richard Feynman recalled finding his colleague, Robert Wilson, sitting despondently amid the celebration. The blast vaporized the steel tower and produced a mushroom cloud rising to more than 38,000 feet. Just before sunrise on July 16, 1945, in a secluded spot in a central New Mexican desert, a prototype bomb nicknamed 'Gadget' was hoisted to the top of a 100-foot tower and detonated. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the first atomic bomb.
