Postdetonation Fingerprints

The world s first ever site of a nuclear detonation (July 1945 at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, NM) was revisited decades later, and samples were collected for detailed analysis to investigate the potential of postdetonation analysis for accurate source attribution (Fahey et al. 2010 Bellucci et al. 2013). Although the Gadget (the code name given to the first test device) consisted of a plutonium core, detailed isotopic analysis of the uranium in trinitite (the glassy material formed by melting 

Highlights There are not many published examples of analysis of postdetonation debris. The reported results from the 1945 Trinity test show that information on the core and constituents of the device can be derived from advanced analytical techniques, with repercussions for nuclear forensics analysis. 

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