On the morning of July 16, 1945, a group of scientists and military officers were gathered in a remote part of the New Mexico desert to watch the dawn of a new age.
It had taken three years to get to that point. The world was at war and these men had worked to develop a weapon that would end it.
The Manhattan Project was the code name of their effort. The weapon was the atomic bomb. And on that morning they would find out whether they had succeeded.
The bomb was 10 miles in the distance. At 5:10 a.m. the 20-minute countdown began. The explosion came a few seconds before 5:30 a.m.
The bomb exploded with the fury of 20 kilotons of TNT. A mushroom cloud rose more than seven miles into the sky. The shock wave was felt more than 100 miles away. A crater 10 feet deep and 1,100 feet wide was left at the site of blast-the desert sand inside crystalized into radioactive green glass.
All their work had come together. The project was a success. The atomic Age was born.
It was more than a bit chilling for some observers. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer later said he thought of a line from Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
President Harry S. Truman was notified of the test results. It would be less than a month before the bomb would be used on real targets.
Modern historians debate whether it was right to create such a weapon. Or whether we should have used it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 100,000 people.
Hindsight is easy. But we see no reason for such revisionist speculation.
The development and deployment of the atomic bomb ended World War II. And saved millions of lives-both American and Japanese-that would have been lost in the invasion of Japan. One can endlessly debate the merits of nuclear weapons. But the fact is the successful bomb test of July 16, 1945, was the culmination of one of the greatest scientific and military operations in history. It was done for the right reasons. And it brought peace.