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uly 16, 1945
United States President Harry S. Truman arrived in Berlin for the Potsdam conference. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill also Arrives on this auspicious Monday as the War In The Far East rages.

Katherine B Fite is issued a ration card. She is about to begin her service as an assistant to Justice Robert H. Jackson. Fite's main responsibility will be to assist in the preparation of evidence and arguments for use in the trials of Nazi leaders at Nuernberg.

Over Japan... A force of 500 B-29 Superfortress bombers strike targets on Honshu and Kyushu. In total, over 1500 American planes attack various objectives on the Japanese home islands during the day. Two weeks earlier, July 2, 1945, Monday, Submarine BARB (SS-220) bombards enemy installations at Kaihyo Island off the east coast of Karafuto; this is the first successful use of rockets against shore positions by a United States submarine.

Japan sustained over 2.5 million military and civilian deaths between July 1937 and August 1945. More than 100 thousand civilians died in the City of Tokyo.

In China... Japanese units begin pulling out of Amoy, in the south

In the United Sates... The world's first atomic bomb the Trinity test is exploded at Alamagordo, New Mexico at precisely 5:30 a.m. on Monday, July 16, 1945, the nuclear age begins. While Manhattan Project staff members watch, anxiously, the power of nuclear fission lights the New Mexico Pre Dawn Sky. The explosion vaporizes the tower and turns the asphalt beneath the tower to green sand. . The steel tower holding the Plutonium fueled device is vaporized by the temperatures higher than the inside the of sun. The illumination is visible up to 180 miles away. It is estimated that the blast is equal to 15,000-20,000 tons of TNT.

The night of July 18,19, 1945 was very stormy in New Mexico. Typically Thunderstorms dissipate before dawn, and the flash of the bomb was explained as lightening the shock was reported as a minor earthquake. Both were cover stories.

Germany Surrendered om May 7, 1945, even before the surrender the US, British and Russian forces were capturing large quantities of refined uranium. The German Nuclear reactor had been captured, and literally hundreds of scientists and engineers had been caught. Germany would have had a nuclear weapon to go with the V 1 rocket, except that they had not produced enough plutonium and they were producing it in minute quantities with a reactor that never fully sustained a chain reaction.

The War Department issues a news release. The first paragraphs read, “Mankind's successful transition to a new age, the Atomic Age, was ushered in July 16, 1945, before the eyes of a tense group of renowned scientists and military men gathered in the desert lands of New Mexico to witness the first end results of their $2,000,000,000 effort. Here in a remote section of the Alamogordo Air Base 120 miles southeast of Albuquerque the first man-made atomic explosion, the outstanding achievement of nuclear science, was achieved at 5:30 a.m. of that day. Darkening heavens, pouring forth rain and lightning immediately up to the zero hour, heightened the drama.
Mounted on a steel tower, a revolutionary weapon destined to change war as we know it, or which may even be the instrumentality to end all wars, was set off with an impact which signalized man's entrance into a new physical world. Success was greater than the most ambitious estimates. A small amount of matter, the product of a chain of huge specially constructed industrial plants, was made to release the energy of the universe locked up within the atom from the beginning of time. A fabulous achievement had been reached. Speculative theory, barely established in pre-war laboratories, had been projected into practicality.”

“On the morning of the 16th of July, I was stationed at the Base Camp at Trinity in a position about ten miles from the site of the explosion.


The explosion took place at about 5:30 A.M. I had my face protected by a large board in which a piece of dark welding glass had been inserted. My first impression of the explosion was the very intense flash of light, and a sensation of heat on the parts of my body that were exposed. Although I did not look directly towards the object, I had the impression that suddenly the countryside became brighter than in full daylight. I subsequently looked in the direction of the explosion through the dark glass and could see something that looked like a conglomeration of flames that promptly started rising. After a few seconds the rising flames lost their brightness and appeared as a huge pillar of smoke with an expanded head like a gigantic mushroom that rose rapidly beyond the clouds probably to a height of 30,000 feet. After reaching its full height, the smoke stayed stationary for a while before the wind started dissipating it.

About 40 seconds after the explosion the air blast reached me. I tried to estimate its strength by dropping from about six feet small pieces of paper before, during, and after the passage of the blast wave. Since, at the time, there was no wind I could observe very distinctly and actually measure the displacement of the pieces of paper that were in the process of falling while the blast was passing. The shift was about 2 1/2 meters, which, at the time, I estimated to correspond to the blast that would be produced by ten thousand tons of T.N.T.” Emrico Fermi


Paragraph nine, of the military report to the War Department,
“The shot was fired at 0530 on 16 July 1945. The energy developed in the test was several times greater than that expected by scientific group. The cloud column mass and top reached a phenonenal height, variously estimated as 50,000 to 70,000 feet. It remained towering over the northeast corner of the site for several hours. This was sufficient time for the majority of the largest particles to fall out. Various levels were seen to move in different directions. In general the lower one-third drifted eastward, the middle portion to the West and northwest, while the upper third moved northeast. Many small sheets of dust moved independently at all levels and large sheets remained practically in situ. By zero plus 2 hours, the main masses were no longer identifiable except for the very high white mass presumably in the stratosphere.”
The vocabulary of the nuclear age began to take shape. Flash, Fallout, Radiation, Fireball, FEAR.


Photos that accompany this article, including text are at Gather.com.

contents are copyright, Karl Leuba 2007, published by permission of the author.
"The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different." ~Mahatma Gandhi
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