Seventy summers ago in a New Mexico desert we crossed a dark threshold when we created the capacity for our own annihilation. A generation earlier Albert Einstein had perceived something elemental about the nature of Creation: Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared (E = mc2). As I understand it, matter is “frozen” energy which when released unleashes the power of the sun. That our instinctual impulse upon gaining such knowledge was to build atomic bombs says something sad about us — we are still the sons and daughters of Cain, and now we’re looking for ways to kill Abel a million at a time.
The first atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, gave the test the code name Trinity. Oppenheimer was, of course, a brilliant physicist, but he was also well-read in religious and philosophical texts. He took the code nameTrinity from a poem written by John Donne, a sixteenth century Anglican priest and poet.
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I don’t know why Robert Oppenheimer chose to name the test of the atomic bomb after the Trinity described in John Donne’s poem. Perhaps it had something to do with the Trinity being fundamental to the nature of God and E = mc2 being fundamental to the nature of physics. I don’t know. Whatever the case, I can’t help finding it sadly ironic. The Holy Trinity is self-giving Love…not an atomic bomb. Our 1945 Trinity gave humanity, not love, but the force to break, blow, burn, and me usdead.
Robert Oppenheimer drew upon another religious text to describe his feelings after witnessing the detonation of the first atomic bomb. After a blinding flash and a hideous mushroom cloud rose over the New Mexico desert, Oppenheimer recalled,
“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… ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
Yes, with the ghastly invention from the real life Dr. Frankenstein laboratory in Los Alamos seventy summers ago we have become death. With that first bomb — and the 15,695 nuclear warheads that exist today! — we have created the capacity for our own mass suicide.
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