Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored

What a coincidence, just yesterday Adam Savage made replica of demon core enclosure seen at: https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-phot...

I used to teach a class on the history of contemporary science (WW2-present) and I started the class with Trinity. There’s no other moment better.

We know how it turned out, but the people there waiting for the test did not know how it would turn out. The bomb might not have worked. Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world. Hans Bethe had sat down and done the calculations on that exact scenario and said it would not, but there was always the possibility of missing something. Enrico Fermi was offering bets on it on the day of the test, as a dark joke.

In the end it worked as expected; one of the most successful and horrifying experiments in the history of science.

Of all the photos from the test the one that struck me the most looking through them today was the photograph of the plutonium core being carried into the ranch house for assembly in a little heavy box. It’s a small thing, about the size of a grapefruit, although twice as dense as lead. It looked just like a sphere of any old metal, but it was something profoundly alien, made inside nuclear reactors. And it still is so strange to me that something that small has so much energy locked up inside and that, by imploding the little sphere just right, we can let the demon out.

Trinity is one of the pivotal moments in the history of our species and eighty years on we still don’t know what the eventual consequences of it will be. The bombs are still here waiting for us and they still pose all sorts of terrifying questions for the future that most people prefer not to think about.

We should get the AI to launch all of the world's nukes at one spot to make the biggest boom we possibly can to mark "world independence day." It would require a little blind trust on the part of a few different nations, but it would be talked about for generations. "Remember when the world blew up all the nukes in a singular huge explosion over Antarctica, grandpa?"

There is a heart breaking documentary about the people who live in the vicinity of the trinity test site, the lack of communication with them around the test, and the lack of recognition and support of their increased rates of cancer and medical spending [1]. I learned a lot from it. While many downwinders [2] gained recognition and compensation for their radiation exposure in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 [3], the population around the Trinity test site was excluded and has never been recognized or compensated for being the first victims of an atomic bomb.

[1] https://www.firstwebombednewmexico.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders#Current_status [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Exposure_Compensatio...

> And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.”

I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.

What I find so strange about the awe and horror of the atom bomb, its utter power and violence, is how it was the result of decades - well, centuries - of abstract thinking in mathematics and theoretical physics. And how it required particularly new paradigms about the nature of the material world.

Imagine a cosmic being looking at the Earth through a microscope, and seeing this bubble pop on the surface in mid-20th century. Then another, and another pop. Some of them evaporated hundreds of thousands of human beings, melting and dying in gruesome ways you can't imagine in the worst nightmares of hell. Later these organisms learn to harness this destructive force for more useful and productive purposes, powering their cities and data centers for machine intelligence. And this massive amount of energy is released by breaking up the tiniest particles of matter, the nucleus of an atom, how clever and strange is that. Well, no more strange than the phenomenon of life itself, I suppose.

One of my big gripes with the film Oppenheimer was the blast itself, obviously a climactic moment in the film.

It looked like someone set off a bunch of chemical explosives. That’s not how it looked in real life. Totally bizarre decision. I don’t know if they were trying to avoid effects on purpose of go gritty and retro or something but the “unearthly cosmic horror” feel of the first a-bomb blast is important. It’s what led Oppenheimer to recite “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

I keep a small collection of nuclear testing-photography related books, looks like I'm going to have to add this one.

Some stunning images, looks like a sun plopped down in the middle of the desert.

The picture I find most meaningful it the one showing the back side of an instrumentation bunker with the foreground occupied by welders on skids with the broom and shovel in the dirt. Those things are essentially the same today even down to their construction. The way they are used is the same. Yet the world we live in is completely different.

I suspect the actual first frames are still classified as they likely evidence detonator tech/performance. So the real first moments of the nuclear age will never be shown. (The high-speed cameras would have started filming shortly before the blast.)

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