Freshly-restored and remastered footage provides a new look at the first ever nuclear test conducted by the US Army at a New Mexico desert in the middle of WWII. The event was the beginning of the Atomic Age.

The original black-and-white video of the test was restored and polished, with all the scratches removed and defects ‘minimized’. The nearly two-minute clip contains a wide shot, a medium shot and a close-up of the explosion. It captures the blast followed by a bright flash sending a powerful shockwave. It then takes the form of a giant expanding fireball, before finally morphing into the iconic mushroom cloud.

The test, code-named ‘Trinity’, was part of the Manhattan Project, a US government research program with the aim of developing nuclear weapons during WWII. The first bomb was detonated at around 5:30am on July 16, 1945, at a desolated New Mexico desert. The explosive power of the blast was equivalent to 18.6 kilotons of TNT.

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