ABSTRACT
The world's first atomic bomb was exploded at the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the team of scientists and engineers who constructed the bomb, watched the bell-shaped fireball mass representing a power greater than any produced before on earth. No living thing touched by that raging furnace survived. The temperature at its center was four times that at the center of the sun. Within less than a minute the fireball was a half-mile high and wide. Oppenheimer, in that blinding instant, thought of fragments of a poem from a sacred Hindu epic: If the radiance of a thousand suns Were to burst at once into the sky, That would be like the splendor of the mighty one— I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. 1
