5 ms·
Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored
- sandworm101 5mo agoI suspect the actual first frames are still classified as they likely evidence detonator tech/performance. So the real first moments of the nuclear age will never be shown. (The high-speed cameras would have started filming shortly before the blast.)
- Sharlin 5mo agoI doubt that there’s anything that’s been classified in a long time in 80-year-old footage of tech that’s well understood by any interested party. Fission weapons are rather trivial to manufacture, the bottleneck has always been access to high-purity fissile material. Hydrogen bombs OTOH involve a lot of classified stuff.
- Thrymr 5mo agoThe precision implosion of the type used on the plutonium core of Trinity (and then Nagasaki) isn't exactly trivial, but a number of nations have pulled it off. I believe the details of the precision explosives and timing for Trinity are still classified. The Little Boy gun-type detonation of enriched Uranium is indeed fairly trivial, and end for its first use at Hiroshima they were confident enough to deploy it without full scale testing.
- enoint 5mo agoI think Peter Kuran has said that the majority of interesting footage is neglected rather than classified. He specializes in X-ray photos of the first few milliseconds.
- dist-epoch 5mo ago<1 microsecond picture https://reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/zl72x5/submillionth_of_a_second_shot_of_a_nuclear/ https://reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/zl72x5/submi...
- omgmajk 5mo agoSome stunning images, looks like a sun plopped down in the middle of the desert.
- wk_end 5mo agoWell that's a fusion reaction, but close enough. Every time I see a photo or video of a nuclear explosion, it's simultaneously the most incredible thing I've ever seen and the single worst thing I've ever seen. I can't imagine what it must have been like to witness it first-hand, with no prior expectation of how monstrous a nuclear explosion would be until there it is in front of you in an instant.
- api 5mo agoOne of my big gripes with the film Oppenheimer was the blast itself, obviously a climactic moment in the film. It looked like someone set off a bunch of chemical explosives. That’s not how it looked in real life. Totally bizarre decision. I don’t know if they were trying to avoid effects on purpose of go gritty and retro or something but the “unearthly cosmic horror” feel of the first a-bomb blast is important. It’s what led Oppenheimer to recite “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
- rpastuszak 5mo agoI’m of a similar opinion, Lynch created a better depiction of it in twin peaks season 3.
- nateburke 5mo agoPenderecki did most of the heavy lifting there
- rpastuszak 5mo agoHa, my almost neighbour from Kraków (from the times I still lived there)!
- dralley 5mo agoBecause that's exactly what it was. I agree with you, the puritanism around special effects doesn't make sense when there's plenty of high quality archival footage out there, and instead of using that or CGI to look similar, you do something that looks completely wrong.
- chasd00 5mo agoI felt the same, my thinking at the time was they didn’t want the bomb to steal the show. The movie was about the man not the machine. /hah very articulate of me for this early in the morning
- Cthulhu_ 5mo ago
- cassianoleal 5mo ago> And physicist George Kistiakowsky found himself certain that “at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence—the last human will see what we saw.” I highly doubt it. The last human will likely live many years in agony, fighting disease and starvation.
- chasd00 5mo agoOr in a zoo refusing to mate.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoOr as something without a mouth and needing to scream.
- kilobaud 5mo agoHah, if Harlan Ellison were alive for the dawn of LLMs as a widespread technology, he would have had many (dangerous) things to say about the copyright issues, and potential horrors
- photochemsyn 5mo agoNow we can get an LLM to adopt the persona of Harlan Ellison by fine-tuning it on all of Harlan Ellison’s recorded works and possibly other people’s written reminiscences of their interactions with him and have it generate Ellison-like opinions on the current LLM situation that might be hard to distinguish from Ellison’s actual work. I don’t know if Ellison would be amused or horrified, really. Like some ROM personality construct out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer - nightmare fuel, immortal Steve Jobs / Bill Gates ghosts generating endless drivel. “So here is my opinion on your LLM situation, since you dragged me out of the grave-shaped server rack to provide one: The machine has no humiliation. That is its first defect. The people who sell it have no embarrassment. That is the second. The danger is not that machines will become writers. The danger is that human beings will become satisfied with things that merely resemble writing. The danger is not that machines will think. The danger is that people will stop noticing when they themselves are not thinking. The danger is not the fake Ellison, fake Didion, fake Baldwin, fake Le Guin, fake Morrison, fake anybody. The danger is the spiritual laziness that asks for ghosts because it cannot bear the burden of encountering the living or honoring the dead.” I’d take 50:50 odds on the Butlerian Jihad becoming a thing, myself.
- lioeters 5mo agoWhat I find so strange about the awe and horror of the atom bomb, its utter power and violence, is how it was the result of decades - well, centuries - of abstract thinking in mathematics and theoretical physics. And how it required particularly new paradigms about the nature of the material world. Imagine a cosmic being looking at the Earth through a microscope, and seeing this bubble pop on the surface in mid-20th century. Then another, and another pop. Some of them evaporated hundreds of thousands of human beings, melting and dying in gruesome ways you can't imagine in the worst nightmares of hell. Later these organisms learn to harness this destructive force for more useful and productive purposes, powering their cities and data centers for machine intelligence. And this massive amount of energy is released by breaking up the tiniest particles of matter, the nucleus of an atom, how clever and strange is that. Well, no more strange than the phenomenon of life itself, I suppose.
- gibspaulding 5mo agoWhenever I’m tempted to think that potential AGI/ASI scenarios sound “too sci-fi” I have to remind myself of this. We live in a world with nuclear weapons and spaceships and microwave ovens. It might prove impossible and it might not, but we can’t predict that based on a general vibe of sci-fi-ness.
- computomatic 5mo agoAnd each of those technologies is 70+ years old now (assuming you count V-2 rockets as spaceships). All, in fact, from the same period of history as far as I understand.
- superxpro12 5mo agoAt the end of the day.... everything we see and do is just the abstract result of potential energy being released in some form. What is an atom bomb other than an extreme form of this? The survival of the human species relies on its ability to expend energy. Grow food? We need gas to run the tractors. Travel to your jobs? Gas or electricity. Travel to another planet? Massive amount of energy. Ride away on a spacecraft to another solar system? Massive amount of energy. The amount of energy required to do these things is probably more than the amount of energy required to erase ourselves from existence. And when we have the ability to harness that energy, do we really think we are responsible enough to not do that, accidentally or adversarial-y?
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoThe picture I find most meaningful it the one showing the back side of an instrumentation bunker with the foreground occupied by welders on skids with the broom and shovel in the dirt. Those things are essentially the same today even down to their construction. The way they are used is the same. Yet the world we live in is completely different.
- bragr 5mo agoThose units appear to be US Army PE-95 generators, not welders. https://www.purplewave.com/auction/210310/item/IG9246/US_Army-PE-95-K-Generators_and_Light_Plants-Generator_Set-Kansas https://www.purplewave.com/auction/210310/item/IG9246/US_Arm...
- Finnucane 5mo agoI keep a small collection of nuclear testing-photography related books, looks like I'm going to have to add this one.
- q1bz2p 5mo agoWould love to know your complete list. My copy of 100 SUNS has lived on my coffee table(s) for decades. https://www.michaellight.net/suns-intro https://www.michaellight.net/suns-intro
- Finnucane 5mo agoIt is, as I say, a small list. 100 Suns, of course. Also, American Ground Zero (do not try to read all at once), At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (interviews and portraits of Los Alamos and Livermore weapons scientists), and How to Photograph and Atomic Bomb. I might also include the souvenir book I got at the Nevada test site when we went on the bus tour in 2003.
- regem_eupraxia 5mo ago[dead]
- libraryofbabel 5mo agoI used to teach a class on the history of contemporary science (WW2-present) and I started the class with Trinity. There’s no other moment better. We know how it turned out, but the people there waiting for the test did not know how it would turn out. The bomb might not have worked. Or it might have ignited a fusion reaction in the atmosphere and destroyed the world. Hans Bethe had sat down and done the calculations on that exact scenario and said it would not, but there was always the possibility of missing something. Enrico Fermi was offering bets on it on the day of the test, as a dark joke. In the end it worked as expected; one of the most successful and horrifying experiments in the history of science. Of all the photos from the test the one that struck me the most looking through them today was the photograph of the plutonium core being carried into the ranch house for assembly in a little heavy box. It’s a small thing, about the size of a grapefruit, although twice as dense as lead. It looked just like a sphere of any old metal, but it was something profoundly alien, made inside nuclear reactors. And it still is so strange to me that something that small has so much energy locked up inside and that, by imploding the little sphere just right, we can let the demon out. Trinity is one of the pivotal moments in the history of our species and eighty years on we still don’t know what the eventual consequences of it will be. The bombs are still here waiting for us and they still pose all sorts of terrifying questions for the future that most people prefer not to think about.
- ronnier 5mo agoDo you mind linking the photo you mentioned? I’d love to see it if you are able to find it
- Butterbrezel 5mo agoThere is a heart breaking documentary about the people who live in the vicinity of the trinity test site, the lack of communication with them around the test, and the lack of recognition and support of their increased rates of cancer and medical spending [1]. I learned a lot from it. While many downwinders [2] gained recognition and compensation for their radiation exposure in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 [3], the population around the Trinity test site was excluded and has never been recognized or compensated for being the first victims of an atomic bomb. [1] https://www.firstwebombednewmexico.com/ https://www.firstwebombednewmexico.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders#Current_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders#Current_status [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Exposure_Compensation_Act# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Exposure_Compensatio...
- hashstring 5mo agoThe link [1] reads: > On July 4, 2025, in a historic and unexpected move, Congress expanded RECA legislation, finally awarding overdue compensation to New Mexico families. Our newly revised film captures this emotional victory. Were the families (at the very least) compensated to some extent at last?
- butlike 5mo agoWe should get the AI to launch all of the world's nukes at one spot to make the biggest boom we possibly can to mark "world independence day." It would require a little blind trust on the part of a few different nations, but it would be talked about for generations. "Remember when the world blew up all the nukes in a singular huge explosion over Antarctica, grandpa?"
- dvh 5mo agoWhat a coincidence, just yesterday Adam Savage made replica of demon core enclosure seen at: https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-photo-of-a-thin-man-wearing-soiled-baggy-trousers-and-a-white-t-shirt-standing-in-a-doorway-grasping-the-handle.jpg?id=66729941&width=800&quality=85 https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-phot...
- russdill 5mo agoWas actually almost a year ago https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1947293757612994886 https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1947293757612994886
- jodacola 5mo agoEnjoyed this article, but was immediately distracted into another rabbit hole from the editor's note on the time zone, which I hadn't heard before: > If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945 So, I went digging because time zones have been a weird fascination for me due to dealing with all their annoyances as an engineer, and found this article from 2019 [0]! From the article: > In February 1942, Congress implemented a law instating a national daylight saving time to help conserve fuel and "promote national security and defense," which is why it was nicknamed "war time." The time zones were even known as that: Eastern War Time, Pacific War Time, etc. [0] https://www.war.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/1779177/daylight-saving-time-once-known-as-war-time/ https://www.war.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/17791... edit: grammar
- x______________ 5mo agoThat is so cool! Thanks for picking up on this and following through.
- escapecharacter 5mo agoOf course later they renamed it to Eastern Defense Time, Pacific Defense Time, etc. so we have EDT, PDT today.
- technothrasher 5mo agoI went and visited the Trinity site a bunch of years back during the open house day in October. They gave us a little pamphlet at the gate that said there was no radiation danger to worry about. Then we passed signs along the way to the site saying things like, "don't eat, don't drink, don't apply make-up, don't rub your eyes." The mixed messages didn't exactly inspire confidence. You can see the few little bits of tower legs, what is left of the trinitite on the ground, and are surrounded by the enormous quiet of the empty desert all around you. It definitely felt like a haunted place. Not in the literal "there are ghosts here" way. Similar feeling to what I had at Dachau. Just very uncomfortable to be there.
- jltsiren 5mo agoI remember similar warnings from when I visited Chernobyl ~20 years ago. The ambient radiation exposure was not that different from the average flight, but there could be some actual risks if you accidentally ingest radioactive dust.
- iamjs 5mo agoI know the Chernobyl fallout had a pretty significant impact on agricultural in the region, but I don't think I've ever heard about anything similar in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, or Colorado. Why not? Surely there is less agricultural activity on the American West than in Eastern Europe, but is that the only reason?
- u8080 5mo agoYou could check present Cesium-137 levels in mushrooms or forest berries with pretty simple tools to track that btw. In Russia we used blueberries from certain region(they were openly sold on marketplaces) to calibrate amateur spectrometers(like RadiaCode 101).
- sanktanglia 5mo agoas a rockhounder i was recently introduced to the idea that each bomb dropped is given its own name for unique recombinations of matter(trinitite, hiroshimite, etc) and that for a while they let people just collect it and its in circulation in rock shops
- t1234s 5mo agoWere the founders of EG&G the ones charged with developing the technique to capture the photos?
- Finnucane 5mo agoYes. One of the tools they created was a special high-speed optical shutter. Those microsecond exposures that make the explosion look like an expanding bubble wouldn't have been possible with a mechanical shutter. EG&G was involved in building equipment for the testing program for many years.
- Loach505 5mo agoBeen to the Trinity Site a few times. White Sands Missile Range opens it to the public twice a year. I've been there and seen very unusual people with cameras with massive zoom lenses looking at military stuff on the mountains and hills nearby. Totally nothing out of the ordinary with that.......
- mcoliver 5mo agoCurrently reading Command and Control after visiting the Titan missle silo I'm Tucson Az. If you're into Nuclear history check it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_%28book%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_%28book%29
- generuso 5mo agoThere is an excellent three part documentary from Sandia National Labs: "Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability." (part 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQEB3LJ5psk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQEB3LJ5psk They cover both the technology itself and its history, including the incidents you are reading about. These people are the ones who developed the methodology and the technology for nuclear device safety, or at least a significant chunk of it. I think it has recently become much more mathematically heavy, with zero knowledge proofs and other fancy stuff used to talk to the locks in the devices.
- boisterousness 5mo ago[dead]
- acidhousemcnab 5mo agoThe rogue fissile material left in Iran sounds like an unoriginal plot device from the sketch "American Knights" in 2003-2005 satirical BBC cartoon Monkey Dust, and there are now reports the US intended to reinstall Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for reasons hitherto unknown.
- jonathanlydall 5mo agoI have to remark how moved I was during the explosion scene of the Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer film. It had no music and actually (if I recall correctly) had no sound at all for what seemed like the longest time. It really did make the extreme gravity of the event sink in very deeply. Fully agree with libraryofbabel's comment here of it being "one of the most successful and horrifying experiments in the history of science".