THE FIRST TEST: 16 JULY 1945
The atomic age dawns at 5.29am on 16 July 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico, when the US detonates a 21-kiloton (kt) bomb named ‘Trinity’.
It is a roaring success, born out of the Manhattan Project, the US’s World War II nuclear weapons programme. Years later Robert Oppenheimer, director of the lab in which the bomb was built, said of that moment: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.”