The day after Rutherford called it moonshine, Szilard conceptualized a nuclear chain reaction. The first nuclear explosion came just twelve years later. On July 16, 1945, under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Army detonated a device code-named Trinity in the New Mexico desert. Weeks later a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the Enola Gay, dropped a device code-named Little Boy containing sixty-four kilograms of uranium-235 over the city of Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people.
