Hey everyone, Sally here. While we, of course, cover history on this show, we also know what's going on now.

And probably, like many of you, we were swept up in the barbenheimer craze this past week with

the movie's Barbie and Oppenheimer coming out at the same time. Yesterday, we released a new episode

about the history of dolls and how we got to Barbie in the first place. And today, we are re-airing

our season one episode on the real story of Oppenheimer and the first atomic bomb test in Los Alamos.

Think of it as our version of a double feature. Enjoy.

History this week. July 16, 1945.

I'm Sally Helm.

It happened within a millionth of a second. In the New Mexico desert at 5.29 in the morning,

in the center of a bomb. A plutonium sphere contracted, then exploded.

It was silent at first, but hot and unbelievably bright. One witness wrote,

it was like being at the bottom of an ocean of light. We were bathed in it from all directions.

The light withdrew into the bomb as if the bomb sucked it up.

Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up. Someone else described seeing a violet

column thousands of feet high. Another wrote, for a fleeting instant, the color was unearthly green.

Then, finally, came the sound. A crack and a rumble like lightning and thunder.

The assembled scientists could see and feel and hear. It worked. They had just detonated the world's

first ever atomic bomb. Today, the Trinity test in New Mexico marks the beginning of the atomic age,

a terrifying new phase of human history. I think historians in the future will look back and see

that one of the key events that happened, if not the most important event in the 20th century,

is that nation had truly decided the use of atomic weapons. How did scientists create

what was then the most powerful weapon of all time? And how did the bomb's existence forever change,

...