Trinity was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted by the United States Army at 5:29

a.m. Mountain War Time[a] (11:29:21 GMT) on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The
test was of an implosion-design plutonium bomb, or "gadget" – the same design as the Fat Man
bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. Concerns about whether the
complex Fat Man design would work led to a decision to conduct the first nuclear test. The code
name "Trinity" was assigned by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory,
possibly inspired by the poetry of John Donne.

The test, both planned and directed by Kenneth Bainbridge, was conducted in the Jornada del
Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what was the
Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range (renamed the White Sands Proving Ground just before the
test). The only structures originally in the immediate vicinity were the McDonald Ranch House and
its ancillary buildings, which scientists used as a laboratory for testing bomb components. Fears of a
fizzle prompted construction of "Jumbo", a steel containment vessel that could contain the
plutonium, allowing it to be recovered; but ultimately Jumbo was not used in the test. On May 7,
1945, a rehearsal was conducted, during which 108 short tons (98 t) of high explosive spiked with
radioactive isotopes was detonated.

Some 425 people were present on the weekend of the Trinity test. In addition to Bainbridge and
Oppenheimer, observers included Vannevar Bush, James Chadwick, James B. Conant, Thomas
Farrell, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Leslie Groves, Frank
Oppenheimer, Geoffrey Taylor, Richard Tolman, Edward Teller, and John von Neumann. The Trinity
bomb released the explosive energy of 25 kilotons of TNT (100 TJ) ± 2 kilotons of TNT (8.4 TJ), and a
large cloud of fallout. Thousands of people lived closer to the test than would have been allowed
under guidelines adopted for subsequent tests, but no one living near the test was evacuated before
or afterward.

The test site was declared a National Historic Landmark district in 1965 and listed on the National
Register of Historic Places the following year.

The creation of nuclear weapons arose from the scientific and political developments of the 1930s.
The decade saw many new discoveries about the nature of atoms, including the existence of nuclear
fission. The concurrent rise of fascist governments in Europe led to a fear of a German nuclear
weapon project, especially among scientists who were refugees from Nazi Germany and other fascist
countries. When their calculations showed that nuclear weapons were theoretically feasible, the
British and United States governments supported an all-out effort to build them.[3]

These efforts were transferred to the authority of the U.S. Army in June 1942 and became the
Manhattan Project.[4] Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr. was appointed its director in
September.[5] The weapons development portion of this project was located at the Los Alamos
Laboratory in northern New Mexico, under the directorship of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The
University of Chicago, Columbia University and the Radiation Laboratory at the University of
California, Berkeley, conducted other development work.[6]

Manhattan Project scientists had identified two fissile isotopes for potential use in bombs: uranium-
235 and plutonium-239.[7] Uranium-235 became the basis of the Little Boy bomb design, first used
(without prior testing) in the bombing of Hiroshima; the design used in the Trinity test, and
eventually used in the bombing of Nagasaki (Fat Man), was based on plutonium.[8] The original
design considered for a weapon based on plutonium-239 was Thin Man, in which (as in the Little Boy
uranium bomb) two subcritical masses of fissile material would be brought rapidly together to form
a single critical mass.[9]

Plutonium is a synthetic element with complicated properties about which little was known at first,
as until 1944 it had been produced only in cyclotrons in very pure microgram amounts, whereas a
weapon would require kilogram quantities bred in a reactor.[10] In April 1944, Los Alamos physicist
Emilio Segrè[11] discovered that plutonium produced by the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Clinton
Engineer Works contained plutonium-240 as an impurity.[12] Plutonium-240 undergoes
spontaneous fission at thousands of times the rate of plutonium-239, and the extra neutrons
thereby released made it likely that plutonium in a gun-type fission weapon would detonate too
soon after a critical mass was formed, producing a "fizzle"—a nuclear explosion many times smaller
than a full explosion.[12] The Thin Man design would therefore not work.[13]

Project scientists then turned to a more technically difficult implosion design. In September 1943,
mathematician John von Neumann had proposed surrounding a fissile "core" by two different high
explosives which produced shock waves of different speeds. Alternating the faster- and slower-
burning explosives in a carefully calculated configuration would produce a compressive wave upon
their simultaneous detonation. This so-called "explosive lens" focused the shock waves inward with
sufficient force to rapidly compress the solid plutonium core to several times its original density. The
increase in density caused the core – previously subcritical – to become supercritical. At the same
time, the shock wave activated a small neutron source at the center of the core, thereby assuring
that the chain reaction would begin in earnest immediately at the moment of compression. Such a
complicated design required substantial research and experimentation in engineering and
hydrodynamics,[14] and in August 1944 the entire Los Alamos Laboratory was reorganized to focus
on this work.[15]