Trinity 75 -- July 16, 1945

Manhattan, the Army and the Atomic Bomb by Vincent C Jones, 1985

Seventy-five years ago today, on 16-July-1945, the Manhattan Project conducted the first test of a nuclear bomb. The test was code-named Trinity. Project leader J Robert Oppenheimer, who was very broadly educated, chose the name as a reference to John Donne's "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God." He later said the explosion reminded him of a line from the "Bhagavad Gita": "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

The following month, two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan. The world has not been the same since.