By Craig H. Piercy, CEO and Executive Director of the American Nuclear Society

Eighty years ago today, at exactly 5:29:45 a.m. local time* on July 16, 1945, the United States Army detonated the world’s first nuclear bomb in the Jornada del Muerto desert of southern New Mexico. The searing flash and thunderous shockwave marked the culmination of the Manhattan Project, a secret, three-year national effort to harness nuclear fission and hasten the end of the Second World War.

The Trinity Test, overseen by Manhattan Project director Major General Leslie Groves and Los Alamos Laboratory director Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, was the final act of that race to build the atomic bomb. Hoisted atop a 100-foot steel tower, the plutonium implosion device, known as the Gadget, unleashed a blast equal to 21,000 tons of TNT and temperatures hotter than the center of the sun.

From ten miles away, observers wearing darkened welder goggles looked on in stunned silence. “We knew the world would not be the same,” recalled Oppenheimer.

Charles Oppenheimer, the grandson of the “father of the atomic bomb,” wants us to save the world with nuclear fission. In “Nuclear Energy’s Moment Has Come,” published in Time last week, Oppenheimer discusses why the public should embrace nuclear energy as a bipartisan solution to the climate crisis.

On December 16 the Department of Energy reversed a decision made nearly 70 years ago by leaders of its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, to revoke the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the first group of scientists and engineers at what would eventually become Los Alamos National Laboratory as they built the first atomic bomb. While it comes far too late for Oppenheimer, his family, and his colleagues to appreciate, the McCarthy-era campaign to discredit Oppenheimer is now itself officially discredited as “a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations,” in the words of the DOE’s recent announcement.

Oppenheimer’s story has been told many times by biographers and chroniclers of the Manhattan Project; a new feature film is expected in July 2023. Today, we offer a #ThrowbackThursday post that examines the scant coverage of Oppenheimer’s life and work in the pages of Nuclear News to date and draws on other historical content—and the DOE’s recent move to correct the record—to fill a few of the gaps.