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70th anniversary of the start of the nuclear age

The nuclear age turns 70 today, Ars Technica On July 16th 1945, the US tested the world’s first atomic bomb. by Jonathan M. Gitlin – Jul 17, 2015 Seventy years ago this morning, the world fully entered the nuclear age with the detonation of the first atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The bomb was the product of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret research program tasked with developing a bomb more powerful than any that had come before. The test, called Trinity, happened at 5:30am local time and yielded an explosion equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT (20kT).

Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist chosen to lead the bomb’s development, greeted the appearance of a second sun over the desert of New Mexico with a quote from a Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Trinity was the first human-made nuclear explosion on Earth, but far from the last. …….

Growing worries about the harmful effects of radioactive fallout drove nuclear tests underground in 1963 with the passage of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and in 1996 most of the world signed onto the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (while the US signed the latter, it has never been ratified by the Senate).http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/07/the-nuclear-age-turns-70-today/

July 18, 2015 - Posted by | 2 WORLD, history

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