At Trinity Site,
5:28:45 AM, the world's first nuclear device was detonated from the top of a 100 foot tower. The 21 kiloton-yeild plutonium fission device illuminated the prairie and surrounding mountains with an unearthly purple glare that was witnessed hundreds of miles away. The fireball carved a shallow bowl into the desert floor, coated with fused radioactive glass called "trinitite." Fifty years later, the trinitite has been bulldozed and buried, and radioactivity is down to 10 times normal background, allowing somber visitors to stand again on ground zero.
A simple pyramid of volcanic rock
bears witness to the birth of the most powerful weapon humans have ever
known -- and like all who have come before us, we offered the prayer that
shadow of nuclear catastrophe forever ends world war.
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