In July 1945, in a New Mexico desert called the Jornada del Muerto, the Manhattan Project detonated the first atomic bomb. This episode treats the Trinity test as a frantic and uncertain engineering puzzle rather than an inevitable triumph, starting with the plutonium-240 problem that killed the Thin Man gun-type design and forced scientists to invent implosion and the explosive lens.

Along the way you will hear about Jumbo, the 214-ton steel containment vessel hauled to the site and then never used; the base camp accidentally bombed twice by American practice raids; the 100-ton TNT rehearsal; the warm plutonium core that jammed until temperatures equalized; and the betting pool on yield won by Isidor Rabi. The episode also covers Enrico Fermi's scraps-of-paper yield estimate, the ammunition-depot cover story, and how a Kodak employee trace ...