When the full-scale site was finished, our assembly team put one together with a pit of depleted uranium but real explosives.  The bomb was put on its’ trailer and I gave it a “rough handling test” by driving it over our washboard desert roads for a couple of hours and then delivered it to the firing site.  An A-frame had been constructed over a concrete pad at ground zero; we hoisted the bomb on a chain, went away, and dropped it 6 feet onto the pad.  Los Alamos people inspected it, and then we all went away again leaving Los Alamos people in the control room.  It was the middle of the night before they fired it, and I watched from under a Sherman tank on a hilltop about a mile away.  It was the most spectacular thing that I had ever seen up until then.  The pyrophoric pit created a huge fountain of burning metal, which set fire to the surrounding desert for almost a mile around, and we spent the rest of the night putting out brush fires.