“It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. “The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun,” writes General Thomas Farrell, deputy commander of the Manhattan Project, the secret team in Los Alamos dedicated to creating the bomb. It is Monday 16 July 1945, 5.30 am, and a sodden night in the New Mexico desert is suddenly a sunny day.
