Trinity Test and Manhattan Project – UPSC GS1

The super bomb, nicknamed ‘Gadget’, was built by a team of scientists at a top-secret site in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

It was developed as part of the US-led Manhattan Project, which sought to build nuclear weapons to give the allied forces an edge over Germany, Japan and Italy in World War 2.

Very soon after the Trinity test, an identical nuclear bomb called ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands of people.

Before it detonated, the scientists had placed bets on what could happen. Some believed that the bomb would be a dud and would fail to explode.

Germany initiated World War II by invading Poland.

A letter signed by Nobel prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein warned then-US President Franklin D Roosevelt of the potential threat posed by an atomic weapon being developed by Adolf Hitler.

Soon after, the US launched a secret atomic research undertaking, code-named the Manhattan Project, which sought to develop an atomic weapon to end the war.

The Project remained a relatively small-scale initiative for the next two years.

It was only after the bombing of Pearl Harbour the project was officially kicked into gear.

By December 1942 facilities were established in remote locations across the US, as well as in Canada.

However, the superbomb was finally designed and conceptualized by a team of scientists at a top-secret laboratory in Los Alamos.

The Los Alamos team developed two types of bombs — one was uranium-based, which was later code-named ‘the Little Boy’ before it was dropped on Hiroshima; the other had a plutonium core.

The project brought together some of the country’s leading atomic experts as well as exiled scientists and physicists from Germany and other Nazi-occupied nations.

The team at Los Alamos was headed by J Robert Oppenheimer, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Oppenheimer later came to be known as the “father of the atomic bomb”.

His team included famous Danish scientist Niels Bohr and Italian scientists Enrico Fermi.

New Mexico residents were pointedly not warned before the test, to ensure that it was carried out secretly.

Data collected by the New Mexico health department, which showed the adverse impact of radiation caused by the detonation, was ignored for years after the test.

A sudden rise in infant mortality was reported in the months after the explosion. Several residents also complained that the number of cancer patients went up after the Trinity Test.

The dust outfall from the explosion was expected to have travelled nearly 100 miles from the test site, posing a serious threat to residents in the area.

Many families complained that their livestock suffered skin burns, bleeding and loss of hair.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are known to have killed well over 200,000 people — many of whom succumbed to radiation poisoning in the weeks after the blasts.

The uranium bomb in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, destroyed around 70 per cent of all buildings and caused around 140,000 deaths by the end of 1945.

The plutonium bomb explosion over Nagasaki, which took place three days later, killed 74,000 people that year, according to International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICANW) data.

After seeing the destruction caused to the two Japanese cities, Oppenheimer publicly admitted that he regretted building a bomb that could cause an apocalypse.

Seventy-five years after the Trinity Test, as many as nine countries around the world are currently in possession of nuclear weapons.

These include the US, the UK, Russia, France, India, China, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea.

At least eight countries have detonated over 2,000 nuclear test explosions since 1945.

The most recent instance of nuclear bomb test explosions conducted by India, were the series of five explosions done as part of the Pokhran-II tests in May 1998.

The first test, code-named Smiling Buddha, took place in May 1974.