American Nukes

About the Trinity Test

When they triggered the Gadget in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, they weren’t testing to see if a nuclear bomb would work. One of the designs for a nuclear bomb—the one used for Little Boy, the bomb dropped over Hiroshima—was so simple in its design that there was no doubt that it would explode. What they were testing in the desert was a more advanced design based on plutonium, one capable of causing even larger and more destructive explosions and which could be produced more quickly.

The Little Boy design slammed two pieces of uranium together, one 3D puzzle piece propelled with gunpowder toward the other puzzle piece. Once you had the uranium, building the bomb was relatively easy.

The Fat Man design used a shell of high explosives surrounding a ball of plutonium. The high explosives had to be shaped just so and the explosives detonated at precise times in order to compress the plutonium very evenly for the bomb to work as hoped. A lot could go wrong with this complicated design. And so they tested it.

In that star-flash scientists and soldiers and engineers and at least one journalist marveled at the yellow and green and purple light of the roiling, rising fireball. But they did not witness any dawning of some new age.

That age—the age of mass casualties and total war—was already upon them. In the months before, for example, the firebomb raids on Japan had indiscriminately burned to death hundreds of thousands of people and laid waste to city after city, horrors beyond waking comprehension today. That a single, long-range bomber and a single bomb could accomplish much the same thing was astonishing only in its efficiency.

Instead, what those scientists and soldiers and engineers and that journalist saw on that early morning was the full revelation of the great trap that humans had built for themselves, that science and technology seem to have inevitably reached out for, a trap that had been under construction perhaps since early man first raised a boney club to the sky.

What they saw was George Washington and Peter the Great, Rembrandt and the entire collection of the Hermitage, what they saw was Mecca and Jerusalem, Plato and Confucius, Beethoven and Shakespeare, every Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Buddhist and Jew, every capitalist, every communist, every man, every woman, every child, every reason for living and every reason for dying, all named as a sacrifice to some greater good.

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