The year is 1945 …
… And nearly 19 kilotons of power explodes over a New Mexico desert, vaporizing immediate surroundings and sending a blast of heat across the landscape, knocking over observers far away at a safe distance. The United States government is testing a plutonium implosion device at a site 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, in what will be the world’s first nuclear explosion. The test is code-named “Trinity,” a reference to the poetry of John Donne that was chosen by the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The plutonium “gadget” is detonated at 5:30 a.m. after being lifted to the top of a 100-foot tower. One U.S. Navy pilot, who is flying at 10,000 feet near Albuquerque, sees his entire cockpit lit up as if the sun is rising, according to a future recollection. The test is a remarkable success, which means the U.S. military can now use the design in war. The Trinity bomb design is, in fact, the same design as the “Fat Man” bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945. Until the weapon was used in war, the U.S. kept the test under wraps, with the Alamogordo Air Base addressing the explosion by stating in a press release, “A remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics exploded, but there was no loss of life or limb to anyone.”
Years after the Trinity test, Oppenheimer would recall how he felt after witnessing the explosion and what was going through his head at the time. He said the explosion reminded him of a verse from a Hindu holy book:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another
Oppenheimer knew he had unleashed a terrifying power on the world that humans cannot fully grasp. It is the reason why his 2005 biography, “American Prometheus,” draws a parallel to the myth of Prometheus. Prometheus was a titan god who defied Zeus by creating humans from clay and stealing the gods’ fire. Oppenheimer did not steal fire; he stole something much worse. Today, we live in the shadow of nuclear proliferation. At any moment, nuclear war could erupt. The tragedy is, we cannot do anything about it. Just like fire, there is no going back to a world in which nuclear weapons do not exist.
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