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Trinity Site nuclear blast radius

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Trinity was the first nuclear explosion, on 16 July 1945 in New Mexico. This page uses the Fat Man yield as an analog for the implosion device (Gadget). The desert grid is why the casualty line is near zero.

Open Trinity Site in the 3D simulator

Educational estimate only. Blast and heat rings use simplified yield scaling. They ignore terrain, weather, shielding, and weapon design. Casualty counts use WorldPop 2020 residents on an approximately 1 km grid and ignore time of day, commuting, shelter, and evacuation. This is not a targeting or civil-defense tool. About the model.

Aim point: Ground zero, Jornada del Muerto · Weapon: Fat Man (21 kt, 607 m (1,991 ft) optimum airburst)

Ground ranges for Fat Man (21 kt, 607 m (1,991 ft) optimum airburst) in this simulator.
Effect Ground range What the model means
Fireball 304 m (998 ft) Maximum luminous radius
20 psi 938 m (3,078 ft) Heavy destruction
5 psi 2.0 km (1.3 mi) Most buildings collapse
Thermal 2.3 km (1.4 mi) 3rd-degree burns
1 psi 4.7 km (2.9 mi) Windows shatter
Rings scaled to 1 psi. Yellow fireball, red 20 psi, orange 5 psi, gold thermal, blue 1 psi. Not a map of buildings.

Casualty estimate at this pin

People on the WorldPop 2020 grid inside this scenario’s 1 psi ring. Rounded educational estimate, not a forecast.
Estimated deaths 0
Estimated injuries 0
Residents inside 1 psi 0

What the rings cover

All rings sit on desert basin around the historic ground zero. Towns are far outside 1 psi. WorldPop cells inside the disks are nearly empty, which is why the estimate is not a city-scale number.

Gadget was a plutonium implosion design closely related to Fat Man, with a yield around 21 kt, fired on a tower rather than as a modern airburst. This tool does not have a separate Gadget mesh; it loads Fat Man’s 21 kt preset so the rings are in the right order of magnitude.

The point of Trinity on a globe is not mass casualties. It is seeing a combat-scale yield in empty land, then jumping to Hiroshima on the same yield family.

The crater and trinitite of the real test are not modelled. Surface-burst physics in this tool can be selected in the globe if you want more local fallout in the simplified overlay.

Related pages

Hiroshima · Nagasaki · Nevada Test Site · Fat Man

All cities and sites

City index · Historic sites · Weapon yields

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