In 1945, Daniel Yearout was a 25 year old private with the Army Corps of Engineers. He describes his experience on 16 July 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time:
"Suddenly, without any sound, the whole world lit up. When I came to my senses, I was lying on the ground with my back to where the light was coming from. I put my hands over my eyes to protect them and I could see the bones in my fingers. It was as if I was looking at an X-ray.
"I whisked around and looked towards the light. I could hear a rumble and the Earth shook. I saw a big fireball rising in the sky - it looked like it was pouring gasoline out there, all the way around. The fireball was getting bigger and bigger and we just stood and watched.
"This was followed by a long rumbling - I'd say it went on for 10 minutes. In and out and round the mountains. The fire began going down and then I saw a swirl of black smoke rising in the sky.
"I was scared at the time. I didn't know what was going on. I remember the man running the camera beside us hollering that it was the most beautiful picture he had ever taken in his life - he said it maybe 25 times. All he was interested in was the picture and all I was wondering was if we were going to get out of there or not."
(From an interview with the BBC.)
He is describing the test of the world's first nuclear bomb, at the Trinity Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico; the bomb was designed and built at the Los Alamos facility of the Manhattan Project. The bomb's yield was 18.6 kilotons.
Continued below the fold.
Almost everyone knows what happened a little less than a month later. On 6 August 1945, a 13 kiloton nuclear bomb code named "
Little Boy"was dropped on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Three days later, the 25 kiloton plutonium bomb "
Fat Man" was detonated over Nagasaki. By the end of 1945, between
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, over 200,000 people died from the attacks. More died later from radiation-induced cancers.
The subsequent nuclear weapons developed and stockpiled by the U.S., Russia, and a number of other countries, make the Trinity plutonium bomb, Fat Man, and Little Boy look like firecrackers. For example, some of the bombs tested by the U.S. had yields anywhere from 600 kilotons to some hydrogen bombs (thermonuclear bombs) whose yields were in the megaton range (one in particular had a 10.4 megaton yield).
Skipping many years ahead, where are we today?
In early May 2005, the UN held a conference on the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. The US wanted to talk about Iran, while the rest of the world wanted to focus on the US, China, France, and Russia, none of whom are moving very quickly toward disarmament. In fact, recently, the US has proposed an overhaul of the certain "aging" warheads, which. The problem:
Democrats and American arms control groups warned yesterday that a new Bush administration scheme to replace ageing nuclear warheads could be used as a cover for the eventual construction of a "black arsenal" of new weapons.
[snip]
Instead of maintaining the old stockpile by monitoring the warheads and replacing occasional spare parts, RRW would entail the design, production and deployment of a new generation of warheads. These would not require testing, and therefore would not break the US moratorium on nuclear tests.
Whether or not that is the US intent, the fact remains that the US is more interested in focusing on Iran's potential nuclear program; it's no surprise that the UN talks more or less ended in a stalemate.
So, there you go. It all started in the desert sands of New Mexico. Where, or when will it end?
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