The Trinity blast

The only color photograph available for the Trinity blast, taken by Los Alamos scientist and amateur photographer Jack Aeby from near Base Camp

The first atom bomb in history, dubbed "the gadget," was detonated at the Trinity Site near Alamogordo, N.M., in 1945, exploding with a force of roughly 20 kilotons of TNT. Scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer later said that while he watched the test, he thought of a line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Nuclear weapons later ended World War II and ushered in decades of fear of nuclear annihilation. Scientists recently found that civilians in New Mexico may have been exposed to thousands of times the recommended level of public radiation.

Source: LiveScience