Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant theoretical physicist who was a professor at Berkeley and at Caltech. At various secret locations around the United States, countless scientists were involved, although a great percentage knew only that some sort of "gadget" was being built, the terms "weapon" or "bomb" were never used in any production factory or research institute. The frontline for research and construction was the Los Alamos Laboratory, formerly a boy's ranch school that was purchased by Oppenheimer. After continuing research in Uranium isotope separation, Oppenheimer was beginning to make progress, using Liquid Thermal Diffusion as a means to separate the Uranium 235 isotope from the rest of a sample of Uranium. After excessive purification, a weapon was beginning to take shape. Eventually, through about two months of construction at the Jornado del Muerto desert in central New Mexico, codenamed "Trinity" by Oppenheimer, the atomic implosion bomb was ready to test in July of 1945. The bomb was to be detonated on Monday July 16, at 4 in the morning. There was much criticism that the bomb would turn out to be a "dud." Due to heavy rains, and thus the fear that the fission components of the bomb could not work under such conditions, the explosion was delayed until 5:10 AM, and the governor of New Mexico was warned that a possible evacuation of the state might be necessary. Thus, at 5:29:45, the "gadget" exploded with a force equivalent to 21,000 of TNT. Only the words of General Thomas Farrel, present at the site, could fully explain the magnitude of the situation; he wrote: .
[The] whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, [grey] and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.