Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico. Louis Hempelmann inserts 1,000 Curies of fissile products from the Hanford nuclear site into 100 tons of TNT stored in the wooden tower. The purpose is to test the resulting distribution of radioactivity before the Trinity experiment. The explosion, the largest ever performed to date, sends a cloud of radioactive smoke 4 kilometers high and creates a crater 10 meters in diameter and over a meter deep. Radioactivity is only measured to a limited extent within the crater. The cloud then moves eastward. The military realizes that the weather conditions during the test will be crucial to limiting radioactive fallout.
