The list of days on which the course of history changed is a short one, and no matter how that list is reckoned, July 16, 1945 belongs on it.
On this date sixty-three years ago, the first man-made nuclear fireball rose above the desert sands near Alamogordo, New Mexico
Which makes this a good day to read Bill Whittle's Trinity again.
ReplyDeleteI've got a chunk of green glass hanging on my wall as a souvenir of the event via the fine folks at United Nuclear.
ReplyDeleteWe 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.
ReplyDelete-J. Robert Oppenheimer, Interview about the Trinity explosion, 1965.
[nitpick]The test actually fired much closer to Socorro, NM than Alamogordo (about 35 miles outside town). Alamogordo gets the rap usually because that's where the main gate to the White Sands National Monument is, along with one of the more heavily-used entrances to the similarly named missile range, but it is at the southern end of the range. Really, I can't blame the scientists a bit. Now you can zip from Los Alamos to Socorro in about two hours if you're not too worried about the highway patrol, but back when getting up to 45mph was a thrill-ride feat on some of these roads... Anyway, zoom out a bit here and you can see the location more clearly.[/nitpick]
ReplyDeleteAlso, am I the only one not in the least surprised that Google, who puts up a fancy-ass logo for stuff as minor as Footnote To History #48's Birthday, has no acknowledgement of today's importance?
p.s. - Unrelated, did you want to borrow my Di Maio book? My email server glitched last week and dropped a couple of incoming, so if you replied, I may have missed it.
Google won't let you use adsense on gun-related sites. Or something like that. Surprised at their banners? No.
ReplyDeleteI've interviewed with them, and being extremely "academic" is something they pride themselves on, apparently being too far ensconced in their ivory tower to be aware of not only the negative connotations of that word, but also of definition on the very first hit FROM THEIR VERY OWN SEARCH ENGINE:
http://www.google.com/search?q=define:academic
And remember, kids, no gum chewing or application of makeup at the Trinity test site.
-E
If you haven't seen it, "The Day After Trinity" is a pretty good documentary on the whole thing.
ReplyDeletePlease, Google's a foregone conclusion.
ReplyDeleteMost of the children (35 is downright ELDERLY there) working out of the satellite office up here in Seattle's Eastside won't wear anything that isn't made out of hemp or some other Earth-Mother-friendly fiber.
Buncha latter day hippe wierdos, with a really nasty quasi- paternalistic streak too. Very arrogant and unpleasant people to deal with.
Just be thankful that you don't have to bump into them in the hallway outside the office each morning.