This is what happened the morning the first atomic bomb created a new world

The extraordinary story of the Manhattan Project

Fifteen seconds before 5.30 am on July 16 1945, above an area of New Mexico desert so unforgivingly dry that earlier travellers christened it the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man), a new sun flashed into existence and rose rapidly into the sky. It was a little before dawn.

This strange, early daybreak was the Trinity Test: humanity’s first encounter with the atomic bomb. Within a month two bombs were dropped on Japan: the first, “Little Boy”, a uranium weapon, at Hiroshima; the