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The Trinity Test
Fat Man was mounted on a hundred foot tower ten miles
from base camp, and the site was surrounded by bunkers for observation,
the closest person five miles away. At 5:09 the first atomic bomb exploded. Even from twenty miles away
observers felt the heat of the explosion and saw a gigantic flash light
up the night sky.
The is an observatiuon of Enrico Fermi describing the blast:
"My first impression of the explosion was the very intense flash of light,
and a sensation of heat on the parts of my body that were exposed. Although
I did not look directly towards the object, I had the impression that suddenly
the countryside became brighter than in full daylight... After a few seconds
the rising flames lost their brightness and appeared as a huge pillar of smoke
with an expanded head like a gigantic mushroom that rose rapidly beyond the
clouds probably to a hight of 30,000 feet... I estimated to correspond
to the blast that would be produced by 10,000 tons of T.N.T."
This was
Maurice M. Shapiro's description of the explosion:
"At the time of the initial flash of light my eyes were not protected, and I was
momentarily blinded, much as one would be in emerging suddenly from a dark room into bright
sunlight. After a couple of seconds I regained sufficient sight to see the
entire sky (in the direction of Trinity) aglow with an orange hue. This glow
disappeared after a second or two, and then I saw a column of dark gases
rising toward the overhanging clouds. Several people near me commented on
the violet color of the cloud of gas, but I observed no such color,
presumably because of the initial effect on my eyes. I estimated the width
(or diameter) of the column of gas as roughly 1/5 mile. After a few minutes
this column rose to a height which I judged to be 8 or 10 miles high, and
then it spread laterally. There were a few small puffs of white vapor, which
I interpreted as arising from a "cloud-chamber effect" (supersaturation
followed by condensation of moisture)."
The blast vaporized the steel
tower that held the bomb and created a crater 1,200 feet across. The sands
around Ground Zero were fused into a green glass called trinite. The blast
was also heard from 100 miles away and the smoke visible from 180 miles.
Finally the years of hard work had paid off and altered the scientific world
forever.
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