As Emilie had prepared us some excellent mushrooms the day before, I found a striking resemblance. With Mom's help, I found it was a very special mushroom: the one produced by the explosion of an atomic bomb.
This explosion was indeed the 1st test of the atomic bomb. It took place on July 16 1945 at 5:30 am in New Mexico in the United States, more precisely in Alamogordo, in the Jornada del Muerto Desert.
It was the result of Manhattan Project which was launched in June 1942 because everybody believed that the Nazi Germany was trying to build their own atomic bomb.
To build the site, the army came to help. It was so big that security rounds had to be done with a jeep.
The plutonium core assembly was done on Friday, July 13th. In the afternoon of the same day, the core was driven to the metal tower where the bomb was to be launched to be fitted in a special mechanism. The whole thing was called "the gadget". The explosion was done on a tower because the higher an explosion is, the more destructive it is.
The explosion, at first planned at 4:00 am, was delayed because of bad weather conditions. The green light was given around 5:10 am because it took about 20 minutes to get to shelter. But the surveillance aircrafts could not make it on time because of the weather.
The theory behind this bomb is that billions of atoms are split within a millionth of a second. For a short period of time, the light produced was like several noon suns were in the sky within 20 miles. The light from the explosion was witnessed from 160 miles away, even a blind woman reported seeing the light from the explosion! The sound blast was perceived from 100 miles! The atomic mushroom reached the altitude of 10,000 feet. The radioactive cloud went up 36,000 feet.
A crater of 400 m was formed, with a hole in the center 100 feet wide and 6 feet deep. Inside the crater only dust remained and around the crater a green material had appeared: trinitite. It was desert sand transformed by the explosion. The tower had vanished!
If I had seen this, I think I'd said it was amazing. An Army general on site found it more extraordinary than usual extraordinary!
See you soon for a new and even more amazing blog.
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