littled.net

I’ve just read an article in Wired marking the sixty-third anniversary of the Trinity test, the explosion of the  first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico, 16 July 1945. An interesting article: as well as citing J. Robert Oppenheimer’s now famous quote following the test, “Now I am become death. The destroyer of worlds”, it also provides a less famous (as far as I’m aware) but just as apt one from Kenneth Bainbridge, director for the Trinity site, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

Wired have also published a small gallery of historical photos relating to nuclear explosions. As always with these kind of images, I found them grimly compelling and some have an almost horrifying beauty to them.

The one above is astounding and one I’ve never seen before: the exact moment of the detonation at Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. It looks almost unreal, with the characters in the foreground still seemingly unaware of the explosion. I’m not sure how this photo was taken, but it is apparently legitimate. It was taken by Hiromichi Matsuda and featured on the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum website.