Anyone Remember Trinity?
Anyone Remember Trinity?
I do; from seventy-eight years ago, even if I wasn't there...
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One morning, it bemused me to discover what mainstream media considers being newsworthy. It was on 16 July 2005, the 70th anniversary of the Trinity detonation: the world's first atomic bomb. Rather than spend a moment or two on merely noticing the inauguration of the nuclear age, they spent most of their time on an awards program where a transgender person won a "courage" trophy, a deeply unpopular treaty with a Middle East theocracy that could achieve none of its stated goals, and a few amusing videos of robbers being taken down by civilians.
An age ago, a school friend's father told of what he saw that morning in New Mexico.
The father was in the Special Engineering Division (SED) of the Manhattan Engineer District working at Alamogordo, New Mexico on some diffusion experiments. You see, the SED was an organization of engineers, technicians, chemists, and other specialists who, plucked out of the regular military, helped with the more mundane tasks required for the highly technical work while under military discipline. The dad was a metallurgical chemistry PhD candidate when the Army drafted him. They had sent the dad to Chicago, St. Louis, and finally New Mexico. He performed metallurgical studies of exotic materials and only knew enough to complete his job, not what he was working on them for.
Just after midnight on the 16th of July in 1945, they bussed him and several thousand other workers to a set of grandstands in the desert, where they shivered in the dry cold for hours.
About an hour before dawn, two spotlights pointed straight up into the sky turned on some miles away, and a siren sounded. The organizers issued goggles to them and instructed to wear them and turn away when the siren stopped and the lights crossed. They did.
Then came the flash and the roar and the heat.
"Oh, wow: we built that?" was the most common reaction after the flash, the roar, and the blast. Others were contemplative, wondering if the war would last long enough to be used.
No one in that crowd of technicians was concerned about any future victims.
I watched with interest and amusement the saturation coverage of the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a couple of weeks later. It offered an interesting counterpoint to the attitudes of the people who actually built the bombs, and those who felt that thousands or millions of lives might have been saved by their use. While there was dissent at the time among those who knew of the devices and their power, the dissenters knew enough not to rock the boat too much: there were specially built campuses peopled with those who had become security risks by dissenting too loudly.
Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study in Miscalculation and Folly
Yes, we talk about the nuclear bombings, and yes, we realize there’s a great deal of controversy since. But at the time, there' really wasn’t much serious or acrimonious debate about it, though there was some concern. It was, for most of the military, another weapon, period.
What mattered in July 1945 was that the war end, how it ended, was for later. Why The Samurai Lost Japan addresses the important questions of 1945, not the moral issues that followed.
Coming Up…
Historiography In America: An Obituary
Shiloh in Popular Media
And Finally…
On 15 July:
1799: Pierre-François Bouchard found a large slab of coarse-grained igneous rock inscribed with a decree issued in 196 BC in three unique scripts near Rosetta, Egypt. Later dubbed the Rosetta Stone, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Greek script of the same decree were the key to reading Egyptian hieroglyphs that had eluded researchers for centuries.
1862: Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas attacked the Union squadron in the Yazoo River in Mississippi, inflicting minor damage on several gunboats. Commissioned that April, Arkansas’ combat life ended when her crew scuttled her to avoid capture that August.
And today is NATIONAL PET FIRE SAFETY DAY. Now, this one is one of those that make you think… “huh.” Do you have a plan to get your furry, feathered or finny friends out of the house in the event of an emergency? Thought about it much? Didn’t think so. Today’s the day…