05:29:45, 16 July: When Trinity changed our world
Published 4:00 am, Thursday, July 16, 1998
1998-07-16 04:00:00 PDT UNITED STATES -- Danville
CENTURY by century, July in America turns out to be a significant month. Our most famous July event, simply known as "The Fourth," commemorates approval of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Then there are those three hot July days of 87 years later - "four score and seven years," as Lincoln put it so gracefully in his Gettysburg Address.
July 16 is also the anniversary of another historic event. It's never celebrated, seldom acknowledged. On this day in 1945, at 05:29:45 a.m., at a secret military base in New Mexico - not much different from those bases in India and Pakistan where a new arms race has begun - the United States successfully tested the world's first atomic bomb.
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The code name for the July 16 project was "Trinity." It was the final experiment of the Manhattan Project. The next time a Trinity bomb exploded - three days after the Manhattan Project's untested uranium bomb had wiped out the city of Hiroshima - Nagasaki was destroyed. World War II soon came to an end.
The most dramatic result of the Trinity bomb - a plutonium-based fission device soon made obsolete by its far more powerful hydrogen-fusion cousin - was to kick start a feverish arms race between the United States and what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Thanks to Klaus Fuchs and other spies, Stalin had been well aware before Hiroshima of the existence of atomic weapons; he was also well aware, and extremely angry, that his erstwhile allies were building these weapons behind his back.
Soon the Soviet Union began its own atomic research program. Naturally, we suspected as much, so our own bomb program blossomed. And once the Soviet Union conducted its own Trinity test in 1949, our research on a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb accelerated, resulting in our first test of this device on Sept. 1, 1952.
A similar test by the Soviet Union showed that not only was the race on, but that nothing would stop it.
Arms races, of course, are not new. But the nuclear arms race was different. It was a race which, if lost, could mean not only losing a war but possibly ceasing to exist. For that reason, the race has not stopped with the fall of the Berlin Wall. India and Pakistan are only the latest (declared) entrants.
Another Trinity spinoff is the redefinition of national security. Because nuclear arms research reaches into so many fields - industry, academia, the military - fear of espionage has spread. We can't just round up the usual suspects. The list now includes everyone from the weapons designer to the physics department secretary.
With so many people under suspicion, the inevitable outcomes are mischief and chaos. Sometimes the right people are accused. Sometimes the wrong people are, with ruinous results. This is a frightful way for any nation to conduct itself, and while America is not the only country tainted with a McCarthy Era, we are the one country whose principles should have made us know better.
Another byproduct of Trinity is the way it altered science. The Manhattan Project marks the first time government, business and the scientific community worked together on a gargantuan research project. But not only that. The Manhattan Project involved technology nobody knew much about. Fission was discovered only in 1939. Until 1942, no one knew if a chain reaction could be accomplished - or if it could be made self-sustaining (the alternatives being that it would peter out or go critical).
And it worked. This huge effort, based on learn-as-you-go technology, worked. The bomb exploded - imploded, really - and the soon-to-become-familiar mushroom cloud rose up and spread itself over the desert morning.
This was a revolutionary way to do science. It is a revolution that has never stopped.
Yet, Trinity meant more to science than a new way of practicing physics, more than this menage-a-trois of government, business and academia. On July 16, 1945, a moral dimension descended, like fallout, onto science itself. Science was no longer neutral. Science, and scientists, now had the power to blow up the world.
Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States has been vigilant regarding atomic weapons. Having been the first to drop the Bomb, we have made every effort not to do so again.
To quote Lincoln once more, "It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."
As of July 16, 1945, America has borne the burden of having given birth to the Bomb and having ushered in 53 years of treating with utmost respect the weapon we created.
We should reflect this week on this new world we established, and also ask ourselves, as the century draws to a close, whether Trinity has made war more likely, or less.
Examiner contributor Cynthia Bass is a historical novelist - "Sherman's March" (Bantam, 1995) and
"Maiden Voyage" (Bantam, 1997). She lives in Danville.<