There were no headlines announcing it, but on this day in 1945 the world changed irrevocably. It was at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Local time, at 5:29:45 the world's first nuclear device was exploded, the near Northern edge of what is now the White Sands Missile Range. And the world was changed forever.
Trinity was an implosion device, fueled as would be second bomb at Nagasaki with Plutonium. It had the force of about 20 kilotons of TNT.
The test was under the supervision of Kenneth Bainbridge of Harvard, himself overseen by George Kistiakowsky, who as an explosive experts had solved how to make the compression of the hollow sphere of plutonium work perfectly.
When the test worked, Bainbridge told Robert Oppenheimer, Now we are all sons of bitches." Later Oppenheimer said what he thought, when they experienced the results of the test, words from the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita:
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
And so the Nuclear Age began, 64 years ago today.
I was born less than a year later. Like the vast majority of those who may encounter these words, there has never been a time in my life when there were no nuclear weapons. Less than a month later we had dropped two nuclear devices, a uranium gun-barrel bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, and an implosion plutonium bomb on Nagasaki on August 9. Since then no nuclear device as been used in anger.
The details of that first bomb were shocking to those who had worked on it. Some had predicted it might be a dud, some worried that it might incinerate the world's atmosphere. The closest observers were about 10 miles way, with more at twice that distance. As one can read in the Wikipedia article on Trinity Site,
It left a crater of radioactive glass in the desert 10 feet (3 m) deep and 1,100 ft (330 m) wide. At the time of detonation, the surrounding mountains were illuminated "brighter than daytime" for one to two seconds, and the heat was reported as "being as hot as an oven" at the base camp. The observed colors of the illumination ranged from purple to green and eventually to white. The roar of the shock wave took 40 seconds to reach the observers.[13] The shock wave was felt over 100 miles (160 km) away, and the mushroom cloud reached 7.5 miles (12 km) in height.
There were reports from people more than 100 miles away, with windows rattled and shockwaves felt at twice that distance. The military said that it had been an explosion of a high explosives bunker, with the real story not being released until after the Hiroshima bomb.
We now have the capability of explosions of inconceivable power compared to this blast. The power of a thermonuclear bomb, perhaps up to 100 megatons of TNT, or 5,000 times the size of Trinity, is well within our scientific and engineering capability.
64 years ago the nuclear genie was unleashed. It is one of the more amazing facts of my lifetime, which almost coincides with the nuclear age, that we have not since August of 1945 seen a nuclear weapon used in anger, and that so few countries have actually developed such weapons.
Think about it. Our efforts were soon being matched by the USSR, with help from spies at Los Alamos. That was followed by the British, the French and the Chinese. Given longstanding tensions with its neighbors, China's acquisition of the bomb led India to develop its own nuclear capability, which then led Pakistan, with the assistance of plans stolen from Europe by A. Q. Khan, to develop a capability in response. Israel did not have the space to test the devices they were developing, so cooperated with the apartheid regime in South Africa to test off the coast. North Korea swapped missile technology to Pakistan to develop its weapons.
So far it has not gone further. In the 1980s' the Israelis set back the efforts of Saddam Hussein by bombing the Osirak reactor. So far Iran has not developed a weapon, and Libya apparently gave up its efforts.
South Africa under Mandela gave up being a member of the Nuclear club. The nations that arose from the breakup of the USSR have in general not continued with nuclear ambitions. But it is only the willingness of nations to forgo such ambitions that has prevented the further spread of the power of nuclear devastation to the hands of nations whose stability and ability to control weapons might be questioned. Of course, one can question the stability and control of both Pakistan and North Korea.
Making a fission bomb is not a complicated process. The science is known. it is mainly an engineering problem, and the restrictions are largely those of producing a critical mass of weapons grade material.
I do not wish to reargue the question of whether the US should have dropped the August 1945 bombs upon Japan. I would rather ponder a more serious question.
There is one important lesson I am not sure we have properly learned from the culmination of the Manhattan Project in the Trinity Test on this date in 1945. It goes something like this: mankind has an insatiable interest in seeing what it can do, and if it can figure out the science and the engineering, someone is likely to proceed, no matter how destructive the results might be.
Splitting the atom did not have to be primarily for the purposes of a military device. After all, some pondered whether they could use nuclear explosions to excavate another canal across the isthmus of Central America, just as TNT has been used for excavation and civilian demolition. One might even imagine that if mining companies could figure out how to direct the force of nuclear explosion more exactly they might consider using same in the extraction of coal - instead of mountaintop removal, perhaps mountaintop incineration? If the human mind can conceive it . . . .
We see this in other fields, cloning, gene splicing . . . Altering nature has never been considered alien to human endeavor: we breed our domestic animals selectively, we create hybrids like mules, we use grafts in growing olives and other fruits. From these it is not that far fetched to consider eugenics among humans, both selective breeding and elimination of those considered as faulty or of diminished quality. IF we can grow new limbs, or replace worn out organs, or transplant organs from one person to another ... and in the later case, where do we draw the line? Is it legitimate to "pull the plug" to harvest organs that might benefit someone else, someone of perhaps "greater value" or importance? If the line is not there, is it that we do not grow human embryos into the producers of replacement limbs and organs? How do we rationalize, moralize, drawing a line one place and not another? And will not someone, someplace, attempt to push the envelope of what is possible?
The very act of ploughing and planting seeds alters the environment in which we live. Whether or not humans are a principal cause of global warming (and I accept that we are), there is no doubt that our very existence alters the world around us in ways few other creatures can approach. A group of beaver can dam a small stream. We can block mighty rivers with our hydroelectric dams, in America, Egypt, and China, for example. We can bury rivers with the detritus of mountaintop removal. We can reproduce pathogens of serious illness and use them as weapons. Does it matter whether it is smallpox passed on in infected blankets to those with no immunity or highly refined anthrax powder in envelopes?
I have no great wisdom to offer in this posting. It is an anniversary. Anniversaries are appropriate times to look back, to consider meaning of actions and events, particularly as we have some distance from the original occurrence.
64 years, longer than I have been alive. I derive a sense of caution from that event. I am haunted by the words that occurred to J. Robert Oppenheimer. So far they exist primarily as a warning, but of something that remains very real. We can destroy the world with nuclear weapons, perhaps causing a nuclear winter, perhaps by poisoning air and water. We can can poison air and water without resorting to nuclear weapons. This aspect of our ability to consider possibilities and realize those possibilities through science, technology and engineering has not yet found its ultimate limits. And we have in far too many ways the capability of destroying ourselves and everyone else.
The words that occurred to Oppenheimer were ancient, from a different context.
They are, however, still relevant to us today, to remind us starkly of what is all to possible.
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
Peace?