The Economist.

On July the 16th, 1945, at 529 in the morning, an audacious experiment took place in the deserts of New Mexico.

It was the culmination of five decades of theories, arguments and experiments amongst physicists who'd been trying to crack a scientific mystery.

What lay inside atoms?

On that summer morning, 80 years ago, it had all led to this.

First the flash of light, that enormous fireball, the mushroom cloud rising thousands

of feet in the sky, and then a long time afterwards the sound the rumble thunder in the mountains

an explosion bigger than anything anyone had ever seen before.

It was the dawn of the nuclear age.

Ever since that day, the world has been grappling with the devastating power of nuclear weapons.

Warfare, international security and geopolitics have never been the same.

Whatever you think of them, these doomsday weapons are here to stay. For 80 years, they've maintained order

around the world, albeit in an uneasy, controversial way. And today, as political tensions rise,

so does their importance. Over the next four weeks in a special series for Babbage, we'll investigate the past,

present and future of nuclear weapons. We'll speak to the people responsible for building

America's stockpile of warheads. Find out how those weapons are being modernized,

how they're being tested without being exploded, and how for the first time in decades,

new weapons are being developed. What started in the desert with the Manhattan Project in

1945 has now turned into a vast technological enterprise,

with thousands of scientists and engineers

spread across dozens of sites around America.

Those facilities include the world's most powerful lasers

...