On July 16th, 1945, 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, the White Sands Proving Ground was rocked by a massive explosion. Constructed via the cumulative effort of thousands of physicists, engineers, and technicians, the device codenamed “Gadget” detonated with the energy equivalent of 25,000 tons of TNT, generating a searing wave of heat and blast pressure that razed the surrounding landscape, fusing the desert sand into black, red, and green chunks of what has come to be called “trinitite”, and prompting J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to invoke the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, declaring...