When “a light not of this world’ rose over the New Mexico desert shortly before dawn on July 16, 1945, residents mistook it for the Apocalypse, or perhaps Heaven descending to Earth in some kind of biblical phenomenon.
There was a ball of flame 10,000 times hotter than the sun’s surface that turned the desert sand to glass and burnt skin off cattle, a blinding light that bathed the landscape for thousands of miles around, a mushroom cloud that billowed 13 miles high and a sound wave that shook the mountains.
“It was like the world was ending – that’s what people thought, that the end had come,” said Tina Cordova, 63, whose father witnessed the blast at the age of four.
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