Explore the scientific crescendo of the Manhattan Project through newly contextualized and never-before-seen photographs from Los Alamos National Laboratory's legacy collections--some just declassified. Twenty-one days before the world learned of the atomic bomb upon its wartime use against Japan, a team of scientists led by J. Robert Oppenheimer detonated the first nuclear device on a remote stretch of New Mexico desert, in an operation codenamed Trinity. Both a military proof test and an elaborate, well-documented scientific experiment, the trial shot on July 16, 1945, brought under the control of humankind a new fire: the energy of the atom. In this expertly curated journey through the beginning of the atomic age, hundreds of carefully restored photographs, still frames, and once-secret documents bring new and vivid focus to a watershed moment in science and history. Written for all to understand, Trinity weaves steadily through subplots and surprises as it traces the evolving, looming backdrop of a world at war. It shadows the humans and gadgets cast into the ruggedness of the test operation; dissects a fiery mushroom cloud unfurling frame by frame, frozen in time; and follows soldiers, scientists, and two atomic bombs across the Pacific Ocean to Tinian Island, onto the strike planes Enola Gay and Bockscar , and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two Japanese cities devastated on August 6 and 9, 1945. Inviting readers into the clandestine spaces where a new era began--behind the cameras, the bunker doors, the gates and guard posts-- Trinity strives, grieves, celebrates, and ponders.

It artfully captures that irreplicable summer when scientists invented urgently in the waning months of the "before"--and the tension between violence and progress, hope and fear, that persists into the after.