The Manhattan Project concluded on July 16, 1945, with the Trinity Test, the first successful detonation of an atomic device. Theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer dubbed the test “Trinity,” inspired loosely by a sonnet by John Donne, “Batter my heart, three person’d God…”

The Trinity Test took place on the plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, at 5:29 a.m. MDT on July 16, 1945. The year 2023 – when Universal Pictures releases the biopic Oppenheimer, based on the story of The Manhattan Project – marks the 78th anniversary of the Test.

The mushroom cloud from the explosion reached 38,000 feet high and left behind a crater 1.5 miles across. The flash of light from the Trinity Test could be seen 150 miles away and knocked over a man standing five miles away. Extreme heat from the blast turned desert sand to glass.

The Trinity Test is described as a scientific achievement that, in an instant, changed the world forever. Created in the hopes of putting an end to all war, it reshaped the future of all humanity from that moment forward.