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The dawn of the nuclear age: Los Alamos and beyond
When Vladimir Putin put his country's nuclear forces on "special" alert shortly after invading Ukraine, he effectively raised the specter of nuclear war—a threat not heard of since the end of the Cold War. The first weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were developed by the Americans during the early 1940s and used to devastating effect on Japan to end the Second World War. They've never again been deployed during wartime. But since 1945, nuclear bombs have been detonated on numerous occasions as tests by the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Israel also has a nuclear weapons capability, but has never publicly declared the fact. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the tests that followed serve as reminder of just how powerful and destructive a nuclear device is, and why launching a nuclear strike as an act of aggression would have unthinkable consequences for humanity.
The Los Alamos Laboratory, codenamed Project Y, was a secret research unit established in late 1942 by the Manhattan Project for the purpose of designing and testing the first atomic bombs. Los Alamos, sited near Santa Fe in New Mexico, is today one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world.
The Manhattan Project was the code name of a top secret undertaking during the Second World War that produced the first nuclear weapons. Pictured is the main gate entrance to Los Alamos, which was always heavily guarded. Image: United States Army
The wartime director of the Los Alamos Laboratory was nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer. He's often credited as being the "father of the atomic bomb."
The Manhattan Project was responsible for designing the atomic bomb of the type nicknamed "Little Boy" that was dropped by a US Army Air Force B-29 bomber on August 6, 1945 over Hiroshima, Japan. This was a gun-type fission bomb.
Three days later, on August 9, Nagasaki was bombed using an atomic bomb of the type nicknamed "Fat Man." This was a more sophisticated plutonium-based implosion-type device.
The Hiroshima bomb exploded with an energy of approximately 15 kilotons of TNT. At the moment of detonation, a fireball was generated that raised temperatures to 4,000 °C (7,232 °F ), turning the city into an inferno. Total casualties numbered 135,000, with 66,000 dead and 69,000 injured. The effects of radioactive fallout was to claim more lives over subsequent years.
Approximately 39,000 died at Nagasaki, with a further 25,000 injured. Pictured is the dense column of smoke, capped by a mushroom cloud, rising more than 18,288 m (60,000 ft) into the air over the stricken city after the explosion.
The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were made possible after a test explosion conducted by the Los Alamos Laboratory, a project code named Trinity. The nuclear device used in the experiment was called the "Gadget" (pictured).
Gadget was detonated at the Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico test site on July 16, 1945, to become the first-ever atomic bomb explosion. The successful test cleared the way for use of a nuclear device against Japan at the end of the Second World War.
Oak Ridge in Tennessee had been established in 1942 as a production site for the Manhattan Project. Secrecy was such that is was only after news of the use of the first atomic bomb against Japan was broadcast that Manhattan Project directors revealed to some of the people at Oak Ridge what they had been working on. Pictured are calutron operators at their panels in 1944. The calutrons were used to refine uranium ore into fissile material. Gladys Owens, the woman seated in the foreground, did not realize what she had been doing until seeing this photograph in a public tour of the facility 50 years later.
Lieutenant General Leslie Richard directed the Manhattan Project and was responsible for selecting targets and test areas. Groves also oversaw the construction of the Pentagon.
This is the sign that greeted employees to Oak Ridge. It reads: "WHAT YOU SEE HERE, WHAT YOU DO HERE, WHAT YOU HEAR HERE, WHEN YOU LEAVE HERE, LET IT STAY HERE." But despite the warning, one man was busily passing on nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Image: James E. Westcott
German theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs worked extensively on the Manhattan Project, after which he relocated to England and joined the the British atomic bomb project. In 1950, he was arrested and later admitted to spying for the USSR. Fuchs was sentenced to 14 years in prison, of which he served nine. After his release, he left for East Germany, where he died in 1988.
In the immediate postwar years, the Manhattan Project conducted weapons testing at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, in the Pacific Ocean. Pictured is the iconic "Baker" explosion of July 25, 1946.
Meanwhile, the Russians were busily catching up. This image is believed to show the aftermath of "First Lightening," the first soviet atomic bomb test on August 29, 1949, when the RDS-1 nuclear device was detonated at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan.
"Castle Bravo" was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll as part of Operation Castle. Detonated on March 1, 1954, the device created the most powerful artificial explosion in history up to then. Image: United States Department of Energy
The "Cherokee" explosion of the US-led Operation Redwing—a series of 17 nuclear test detonations from May to July 1956—rises above the clouds over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean on May 20, 1956.
