Tower and Town, May 2018

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Now, I Became Death

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. 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.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

The "American Century" was a concept put forward in 1941 by the publisher Henry Luce, who declared that in the years ahead the U.S. must "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purpose as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." The eminent theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, as director of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, had much to do with forging the alliance between science and government that contributed greatly to the realization of Luce's concept. (This, however, came at a price).

“The Gadget”, (implosion-design plutonium device), was already hoisted on top of a tower at Ground Zero in the New Mexico desert, USA, as groups of scientists and military personnel gathered at various locations and distances from Ground Zero in order to observe the “Trinity” test. Oppenheimer, who was inspired by the poetry of John Donne to assign the codename “Trinity”, was with other key scientists at the command location 10 miles away from the gadget when an intense fireball lifted off the ground upon detonation at 5:29 am on 16 July 1945. A blast of 21 kilotons of TNT yield was accompanied by intense light. An eye witness, (Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell), described it as follows:

The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.

Thunderous sound and air pressure wave soon followed as the ominous mushroom cloud began to rise to the heavens above the Trinity site. The explosion scattered radioactive particles from the poles to the equator, leaving an indelible signal in the surface strata of the Earth plus some images which have since burned themselves into the consciousness of the human race.

Here the man most responsible grappled with the unprecedented implications and sought some meanings within the lines from the Hindu scripture (above). Here was a moment of human awakening….here was a realisation that things will never be the same again.

And as measurable deposits of radioactive ash began to accumulate globally following the WWII bombing days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and subsequent arms-race inspired hundreds of nuclear tests a new geological epoch of planet earth began to emerge. Now it is the turn of the geologists to ponder if 16 July 1945 should be assigned the starting point of the new Anthropocene Epoch.

The term ‘Anthropocene’ was first coined by Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen who in 2000 suggested that man’s impact on the world was so substantial that we were no longer in the Holocene – the era which began at the end of the last Ice Age around 11,700 years ago and saw unprecedented human expansion and the emergence of towns and cities.

Raik Jarjis