July 16, 1945 The first US test explosion of the atomic bomb is made at Alamogordo Air Base, south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, equal to some 20,000 tons of TNT. It is the culmination of 28 months of intense scientific research conducted under the leadership of physicist Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer under the code name Manhattan Project. The successful test is witnessed by only one journalist, William L. Laurence of the New York Times, who describes