The Manhattan Project was one of the most destructive and important happenings of the twentieth century. A giant secret undertaking to build the worlds first atomic bomb during the Second World War . These photographs depict three aspects of the dawn of the Atomic Age.

The training airfield in Wendover, Utah. This is where the crew trained and the now near derelict hanger that once housed the Enloa Gay B29 aircraft still stands.

The Trinity site in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert where the first ever nuclear device was detonated in July 1945 as a test a few weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima in Japan. The heat generated turned sand to glass and made a substance called Trinitite still found on the government restricted site.

Enola Gay crew member Morris R Jeppson at his home shortly before his death. The Enola Gay bomber plane dropped the first nuclear bomb used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan, Aug. 6, 1945.

When the bomb detonated above Hiroshima, the Enola Gay’s tailgunner was the only crewman who witnessed the explosion, Mr. Jeppson recalled. “The rest of us saw the billowing clouds and the mushroom cloud rising,”