Gadget

Cindy Kelly: I am Cindy Kelly, Atomic Heritage Foundation. It is December 7, 2017, in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I am with Jim Eckles. I would like to start by asking him to say his full name and spelling it. Jim Eckles: Jim Eckles, E-C-K-L-E-S. Kelly: Terrific. Jim, why don’t you just tell us a little […]

 Martin Sherwin: This morning I am making arrangements to interview Norris Bradbury in Los Alamos, New Mexico. January 10, 1985. How would you characterize the major problems that [J. Robert] Oppenheimer had when he first got the job as the administrator for Los Alamos? Or at least, when you came on? Norris Bradbury: Let’s get this […]

Located in a bucolic setting surrounded by tall pines, these humble wooden and asbestos-shingled buildings were where the world’s first atomic device was assembled. Here scientists, engineers, and explosives experts worked around the clock on the “Gadget,” the first plutonium-based atomic explosive.

The birth of nuclear weapons occurred on July 16, 1945 at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico, 230 miles south of Los Alamos. Gadget (as the bomb was known) was an implosion plutonium bomb, like the one used at Nagasaki, and detonated with 20 kilotons of force, slightly more than the Little […]