On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 a.m., the world changed forever. The Trinity Test (aka the world’s first nuclear explosion), carried out in secret on a plot of empty land smack dab in the middle of New Mexico and overseen by Julius Robert Oppenheimer, proved the atomic bomb was a viable weapon of mass destruction. You can draw a direct line from that moment to the bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear arms race that defined the Cold War, and the looming threat of self-assured nuclear annihilation that persists even today.
