Monday. 5:29:45 AM (local time). The first atomic bomb explodes. On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb in history was secretly detonated in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico. The British and Americans had begun developing the bomb in utmost secrecy in 1940. In 1942, the atomic bomb program was taken over by the U.S. Army under the code name “Manhattan Project,” and in 1943, a laboratory was established in the New Mexico desert under the direction of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. By July 1945, at the time of the successful “Trinity” experiment, over $2 billion had already been spent on research and development of the bomb. News of the deadly new weapon was only released three weeks later, when two similar devices devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer recites some verses from the Indian sacred text Bhagavad-Gita: “And now I become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”.
