Video: 'Explosion and smoke cloud of the first Atomic Bomb detonation rising at Alamogord...HD Stock Footage'

(Sunday, July 16, 1945, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time; during World War II) — The Atomic Age began this morning when the United States successfully detonated a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Trinity bomb site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, unleashing an explosion equivalent to that of 19 kilotons of TNT (click here for a clip of this event from “American Experience: Truman” at 1:55:04).

Video: 'First Atom Bomb Trinity Test Manhattan Project 15-16 July 1945' (detonation at 8:19)

Video: 'Peter Jennings - Hiroshima: Why the Bomb was Dropped (1995)' (July 15-16, 1945, at 47:29)

Video: 'The World at War: The Bomb: February-September 1945 (24 of 26)' (July 16, 1945, at 25:28)

Just hours later, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis left Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California on a secret mission to deliver atomic bomb components to Tinian Island in the Marianas.