16 July

‘Thirty-seconds after the explosion came, the air blast pressing hard against people and things, to be followed almost immediately by a strong sustained awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty.’

Report of General Farrell

Today in 1945 and just weeks before the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first atomic bomb was exploded at the Trinity test site, Alamogordo, New Mexico.

If the radiance of a thousand suns

were to burst into the sky,

that would be like

the splendor of the Mighty One-

I am become Death, the shatterer of Worlds.

Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns