Wikipedia:Main Page history/2015 July 16

Trinity was the code name given to the first test detonation of a nuclear weapon. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, took the name from a John Donne poem. It was conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in the Jornada del Muerto desert. The only structures originally in the vicinity were on the McDonald Ranch site, which scientists used as a laboratory for testing bomb components. A base camp was constructed, and there were 425 people present on the weekend of the test. It used a Fat Man bomb of the same design as the one that would be detonated over Nagasaki. The complex implosion-type nuclear weapon required a major design effort from the Los Alamos Laboratory, and testing was required to allay fears that it would not work. Its detonation (shown on video) produced the explosive power of about 20 kilotons of TNT (84 terajoules). The test site is now part of the White Sands Missile Range. It was declared a National Historic Landmark district in 1965, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places the following year. (Full article...)

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July 16: Feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (Roman Catholic Church); beginning of The Nine Days (Judaism, 2015)

• 622 – The epoch of the Islamic calendar occurred, marking the year that Muhammad began his Hijra from Mecca to Medina.
• 1769 – Spanish friar Junípero Serra founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá (pictured), the first Franciscan mission in the Alta California region of New Spain.
• 1950 – Korean War: A Korean People's Army unit massacred twenty-one U.S. Army prisoners of war.
• 1965 – South Vietnamese Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo—an undetected communist spy—was hunted down and killed after being sentenced to death in absentia for a February 1965 coup attempt against Nguyễn Khánh.
• 2013 – At least 23 students died and dozens more fell ill at a primary school in the village of Dharmashati Gandaman in the Saran district of the Indian state of Bihar after eating a Midday Meal contaminated with pesticide.

• More anniversaries:
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  • July 17