Trinity test lights the New Mexico desert

July 16, 1945

At 5:29 a.m. at a patch of scrub called Jornada del Muerto, the first atomic bomb exploded. The blast was visible for two hundred miles; the heat burned the sand to glass. Robert Oppenheimer thought of a Hindu scripture: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Twenty-one days later Hiroshima vanished.