The Nuclear Era Begins: A Brief Background on the Trinity Project

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The Nuclear Era Begins: A Brief Background on the Trinity Project Introduction The 20th Century unleashed a fury of new technologies and discoveries that changed the course of the world. Developments in physics led the charge with the likes of Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch who, in 1939, demonstrated and coined the process of fission. Potentially, no individual discovery influenced the course of history like the development of nuclear fission. With the world at war, and the Axis forces winning on multiple fronts, the United States chose to utilize these latest discoveries to create the most devastating weapons this world had ever seen, the nuclear bomb. These theories of physics and engineering initially became a reality in New Mexico, and eventually led to the deployment of two nuclear bombs in Japan; thus, swinging the tide of World War II to the Allies’ favor. The top secret development, construction, and testing of these technologies is known as the Trinity Project and changed the world forever. From 1945 to 1962, the United States government, through the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) and its successor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), conducted 235 tests of nuclear devices at sites in the United States and in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In total, an estimated 220,000 Department of Defense (DOD) participants, both military and civilian, were present at the tests. Project TRINITY, the war-time effort to test-fire a nuclear explosive device, was the first atmospheric nuclear weapons test (Lansing, 1965). Research Paper Establishment of a United States Nuclear Program Prior to World War II, the United States of America had very little interest in the development of a nuclear weapon. German forces seized c... ... middle of paper ... ...ng discovery of nuclear fission was the first piece leading to the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. The research at LASL has led to the creation of thousands of nuclear missiles, changing the scope of combat and political influence forever. Works Cited Bainbridge, K. T. (1976). Trinity. Los Alamos, N.M.: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. General Electric Company-TEMPO. (1979). Compilation of local fallout data from test detonations 1945- 1962 extracted from DASA 1251. Washington, DC: Defense Nuclear Agency. Lansing Lamont, (1965). Day of Trinity. 1st ed. New York: Atheneum. Los Alamos Scientific Labratory. (1967). Los Alamos: Beginning of an Era 1943-1945 .... Los Alamos, N.M.: LASL. Szasz, F. M. (1984). The day the sun rose twice: the story of the Trinity Site nuclear explosion, July 16, 1945. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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