In the early hours of July 16, 1945, in a remote part of the New Mexico desert, a group of scientists, engineers and military personnel attended an event that would define the course of history and change a war that had ravaged much of the world for years. Moments after a giant fireball rose high into the sky, a huge shock wave thundered toward the onlooking crowd. The Trinity nuclear test had been a success.
The story of the Manhattan Project is well known. But one area that may be overlooked is the human effort involved in bringing the mission to life. In her new book "Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test" (The University of Chicago Press, 2026), author Emily Seyl, a science writer and editor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's National Security Research Center, uses never-before-seen photography from the laboratory’s legacy collections to highlight the physical and mental effort that went into the project.
