In about an hour and 20 minutes...

[punpirate]

... it will be the 60th anniversary of the birth of the atomic bomb. The first bomb was not dropped on Hiroshima, but, rather, on New Mexico, exploded from a tower in the aptly-named Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) desert, near Alamagordo, in what is now known as the White Sands Test Range at 5:29:45 Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945.

The Trinity Test, as it was called, ushered in sixty years of an arms race that could not make us safer, just warier and more suspicious of the rest of the world. It was a plutonium bomb, fueled by a material not known to exist naturally just four years before, Pu 239.

In five years, the United States would possess between 400 and 500 such weapons, with roughly three to four times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. By 1960, fifteen years later, that arsenal would grow to around 68,000 nuclear warheads, from multi-megaton fusion bombs deliverable only by B-52 to warheads so small that they could be fired from a jeep-mounted recoilless rifle. The US inventory at that time is said to have been in the neighborhood of 18,000 megatons.



Los Alamos Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer would speak these lines from the Bhagavad-Gita as he watched the fireball rise into the early morning sky:

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The destroyer of Worlds.


Links to Quicktime movies of the Trinity test:

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Trinty1.mov

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Trinty2.mov

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Trinty3.mov

Today, despite international efforts to control proliferation of such weapons, the United States and Russia still have many thousands of warheads each. France, Great Britain, Israel and China are said to possess such weapons in the several hundreds. Pakistan and India likely have dozens. Other countries have nuclear programs which may eventually produce smaller weapons in small quantities.

The Cold War which began with the fervent and futile desire of the US to hide its atomic secrets from the rest of the world is over, but the weapons it created--and the potential for societal destruction they represent--are still with us. Even after sixty years of unease, uncertainty and undifferentiated fear acting as a poor substitute for genuine peace, the United States continues to wield its weapons against the rest of the world, suggesting new military uses for them and new policies which assert its right to use them at will, even against other countries who do not possess such weapons.

It is the morning of July 16, 2005, and the clock created by the Union of Concerned Scientists to warn the world of impending calamity is ticking ever closer to zero hour.

[althecat]

1. Reccommended... I guess the time has passed by now..

[orpupilofnature57]

2. And with all this collective genius,we still have cancer. We care more ...

about death, than anything else, especially controlling who dies.

[kliljedahl]

3. Thanks, a timely reminder

Keith’s Barbeque Central