The Unthinkable Power: A 10-Part Series on Nuclear Weapons
**Key Takeaway:** *How desperation in WWII birthed history’s most destructive weapon.*
The Manhattan Project—a clandestine U.S. program involving 130,000 scientists and $2 billion (today’s $23 billion)—culminated in the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945. In New Mexico’s desert, the first nuclear detonation unleashed energy equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT, vaporizing the tower it stood on and melting sand into radioactive glass ("trinitite"). J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project’s lead, famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita: *"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."*
