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Into History.

com. It's 529 a.

It's 5.9.

It's 5.29 a.m. on July 16, 1945 aboard an American B-29 bomber circling a remote part of New Mexico.

Captain William Parsons kneels between the plane's pilot and

co-pilot as he looks out of the cockpit's lower windows.

Hazy clouds beneath the bomber obscure his view of the ground, where Captain Parsons

knows that 20 miles away is White Sands, a military

testing range. He and his crew have orders not to get any closer or drop any lower,

otherwise they may unwittingly become victims of the world's first atomic bomb.

Three years ago President Franklin D Roosevelt authorized the U.S. military to begin developing

a new type of weapon, a bomb that used a nuclear

reaction to cause overwhelming destruction.

Thanks to the vast resources thrown at the Manhattan Project, as the research program was

known, a prototype atomic bomb was built.

And today, the U.S. Army is conducting its first test detonation, and Captain Parsons is tasked

with recording the explosion from the air.

Parsons checks his watch.

It's been calibrated to the second with a mission clock

...