#27: Physicist Harold Agnew
This looks like an average photo of an average guy. However, when you learn the backstory of this photograph, the cheerfulness on the man’s face becomes quite jarring. This is a 1945 image of Manhattan Project physicist Harold Agnew holding the plutonium core of the atomic bomb that eventually killed 80,000 people in Nagasaki, Japan.
We weren’t joking when we said the smile on Agnew’s face would become jarring. It’s a strange image to see someone so cheerfully holding something that would devastate an entire country and drastically change the course of history. We guess you could say that this photograph did not age well.