Trinity Site; July 16, 1945
White Sands Missile Range: United States Army, White Sands Missile Range, Public Affairs Office, 2000. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Booklet. Format is approximately 7 inches by 8.5 inches. Unpaginated (16 pages plus covers). Illustrations. Reading List. Illustrated front and back covers. Inside the back cover is a drawing of the patch which was issued to military personnel who participated in the Manhattan Project. This provides an overview of the Trinity Site and the first atomic test event. Major headings are: Radiation at Trinity Site; Typical radiation exposures for Americans; Trinity Site National Historic Landmark, with subsections on The Manhattan Project, The Theory, Building a test site, Jumbo, Bomb Assembly, The test, After the explosion, It's the Schmidt house, and Afterwards. There is also a brief section on the White Sands Missile Range. Laid in is a single sheet approximately 8.5 inches by 11 inches printed on one side presenting the Entry Rules, of which there are thirteen numbered items (numbers 10 to 13 are not technically a rules but guidance and direction). The sheet has been folded in half to fit inside the booklet. Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what was then the USAAF Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, now part of White Sands Missile Range. The only structures originally in the vicinity were the McDonald Ranch House and its ancillary buildings, which scientists used as a laboratory for testing bomb components. A base camp was constructed, and there were 425 people present on the weekend of the test. The code name "Trinity" was assigned by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, inspired by the poetry of John Donne. The test was of an implosion-design plutonium device, informally nicknamed "The Gadget", of the same design as the Fat Man bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. The complexity of the design required a major effort from the Los Alamos Laboratory, and concerns about whether it would work led to a decision to conduct the first nuclear test. The test was planned and directed by Kenneth Bainbridge. Fears of a fizzle did lead to the construction of a steel containment vessel called Jumbo that could contain the plutonium, allowing it to be recovered, although ultimately this was not used in the test. A rehearsal was held on May 7, 1945, in which 108 short tons (96 long tons; 98 t) of high explosive spiked with radioactive isotopes were detonated. The Gadget's detonation released the explosive energy of about 25 kilotons of TNT (100 TJ). Observers included Vannevar Bush, James Chadwick, James Conant, Thomas Farrell, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Leslie Groves, Robert Oppenheimer, Geoffrey Taylor, Richard Tolman, Edward Teller, and John von Neumann. The test site was declared a National Historic Landmark district in 1965, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places the following year. Condition: Very good.
Keywords: Atomic Bomb, Manhattan Project, Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, White Sands Missile Range, Los Alamos, Atomic Test, Radiation, National Historic Site, Bomb Assembly, Historic Landmark
[Book #83974]
Price: $35.00