Ernest Moniz: Trinity obviously set off the
atomic age, and it was the culmination of,
was one of the most extraordinary scientific
efforts done at Los Alamos.
Alan Carr: During World War II, two entirely
different types of weapons were developed.
There was the uranium gun-type weapon, which
was known as Little Boy. There was Fat Man,
which was the plutonium implosion weapon.
They were confident enough with Little Boy
to send it into combat without a full-scale
test. However, Fat Man, because it was more
complicated, they wanted to test it first
before they dropped it over enemy territory.
I think Oppenheimer in particular knew, that
not only was this going to potentially end
the war, help end the war, but that it was
going to change history as well. And of course
you have to think, what if it didn't work?
You can imagine what it would be like if we
dropped a significant amount of plutonium
on enemy territory and it was captured. So,
that was the pressing concern. It had to work.
I think one thing to really consider is that
this had never been done before. Nobody had
ever conducted a nuclear test, there was no
precedent for that. When they were assembling
the bomb, the pieces didn't fit together.
There was some expansion and contraction with
the components. And there were some pretty
tense moments. They conducted the test atop
a 100-foot steel tower. How do you get a nuclear
bomb 100 feet off the ground? Well, it's another
very tense operation just cranking this thing
slowly up the tower. One of the reasons why
they selected the Trinity Site was that it
never rains there. And late that night, there
was not only rain, but a tremendous thunderstorm,
a lightning storm that came through. About
5:30 in the morning, the detonation finally
occurs. The Trinity test goes off and it's
a remarkable success.
Hans Bethe: Then it took place and was very
impressive. The results were far greater than
we expected.
Phillip Morrison: Well of course it was an
extraordinary experience … we’d been working
on this thing for a long, long time.
Norman Ramsey: I think I was most impressed
by the light that was given, it really did
light up the whole area.
Edward Teller: I was looking straight at the
right spot, there appeared a very small point
of light, and my first impression was, I very
distinctly remember, “is that all?” Then
I remembered I had on these glasses, so outside
it might be a little bigger.
Berlyn Brixner: It was so bright it simply
blinded me. So then I looked over to the left
at the Oscura Mountains, and I saw that they
were lit up as though by daylight.
Bethe: Oppenheimer looked very relieved, as
might be expected, after all it had worked
and the tension was over.
Bill Archer: When they brought in, in '44,
the IBM punch card accounting machines, that's
when we started actually building what we
think of now as scientific computers. And
that's what we actually used for the Trinity
device was -- designing it -- was those punch
card machines. So, it's been key all the way
along. The thermonuclear devices that the
U.S. designed right after the Soviets shot
their first device, we designed those on all
the first-generation machines.
Alan Carr: The United States, the Soviet Union
tested in the atmosphere early on, basically
the late '40s for the United States when the
Soviets developed their first atomic bomb
in the fall of 1949 from that point forward
the Soviet Union tested in the atmosphere
in the 1950s as well. Testing went underground
in the 1960s.
Harold Agnew: I was concerned that the amount
of money we were spending in the early days
doing experiments in Nevada compared with
the amount of money we spend on calculations
was entirely out of whack.
Carr: After the Soviet Union collapsed the
United States began exploring the feasibility
of maintaining the nuclear stockpile without
full-scale testing.
CBS News: Three-Two-One. The wizards of Armageddon
used to rely on underground tests to make
up for what they didn’t know, but the Clinton
administration has suspended those tests,
so how can the wizards still be sure that
the twenty thousand weapons that remain the
the stockpile  actually work? What happens
to a nuclear weapons after it’s been sitting
in a bunker for ten, twenty, even fifty years?
Scientists at Los Alamos claim it will take
a ten thousand fold increase in computing
power to find out.
John Morrison: I was actually involved in
the early days of ASC, it was an initiative
at the time, started in 1996, and the goal
was to develop modeling and simulation capability
to support a move to no underground nuclear
testing.
Archer: We've been in this business 70 years
now. And we're entering a fourth era of computing
technology. The first era was the serial era,
where we'd run one code on one CPU, that was
all that was in the machine. The next era
was the vector era, which came with the Crays,
and where we start breaking the problem up
into little pieces, where we could run parts
of it at a time, multiple parts of it at a
time. With the ASCI program that started
in '96 or so, we started going to these commercial
clusters and that we can buy many processors
and hook them together with networks, and
then we're parallelizing the problem across
thousands of processors. And now we're going
to an era where that's going to from thousands
of processors to maybe a million or more.
The Trinity shot was the first nuclear weapon,
and the Trinity machine is the first advanced
technology system, then that's the beginning
of this era of new types of machines. We don't
even know the name for it at this point, this
new era, because the technology is changing
so fast on us. We've gone through many Serial
Number 1 machines, and Trinity will be another
one. it's exciting to bring up one of these
machines and see the technology mature.
Carr: The Trinity test was obviously the culmination
of the Manhattan Project. But the Trinity
test itself, more than being just the culmination
of one project, was one of the most significant
scientific experiments of all time. It truly
changed the course of history in a moment.
Today, the laboratory's a very different place
than it was during World War II, but at its
heart remains world-changing innovation. We
don't test nuclear weapons now, but we do
maintain our stockpile using some of the most
powerful computers in the world. Our new one,
which is being built now, which we've named
Trinity, is going to continue that legacy,
that tradition of stockpile stewardship.
