Reconstructing the first atomic bomb test from a chunk of scorched earth

Trinity test explosion, July 16, 1945. (credit: Wikimedia)

If the CSI family of television shows has blunted your appetite for impossibly omniscient crime scene analysis, consider the real, and very serious, science of nuclear forensics. If someone flouts the ban on nuclear weapons testing, we want to know as much about it as possible. And the resources backing that effort are substantial.

Seismic waves betray the occurrence of underground tests, and air samples grabbed soon afterward can contain the radioactive proof. But both are transient, and even radioactivity at the site of the explosion can fade too quickly to be of much use. A group of researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have demonstrated a new technique than can reveal the potency of the bomb from the debris—even decades after the fact.

To test the technique, they tried it out on the famous 1945 Trinity test site in New Mexico, where the very first atomic bomb was detonated less than a month before nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The heat of the blast fused the sandy surface into glassy rock that took on the name “trinitite.” Immediately after the explosion, that trinitite would have been loaded with short-lived radioactive isotopes that could tell you about how the bomb functioned, but the most important indicators dissipate within months.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments