Trinity

by Louisa Hall

“I was thinking of that line from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’” Watching him deliver that line, it struck me that he probably wasn’t thinking that when the bomb really went off, or he wouldn’t have needed to send me home for the book, so that he could look the line up. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that for Robert, there was no language short of myth to describe his bad situation. That was something I understood. By then, I realized, he felt he could

Legacy

Then, in a state of mesmerized detachment, I’d stare at images of mushroom clouds in various countries: the Trinity Test in the Jornada del Muerto desert, followed by explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by the Soviet tests of Joe 1, Joe 2, and Joe 3. And then the first real United States thermonuclear test, Ivy Mike, which incinerated an island in Eniwetok Atoll, followed by the Soviet test of the Sloika, followed by the U.S. test of Castle Bravo, which spread nuclear fallout over the Rongelap and Rongerik atolls, and poisoned the crew of a Japanese fishing boat, and polluted waters as far as Australia. And those were only just a few of the tests. There were tests underwater, tests in outer space, submarine-launched tests, tests buried in craters. Crime and retribution, over and over again, leading to the Soviet test of the Tsar

Bomba, in 1961, the biggest bomb ever exploded, with a mushroom cloud seven times the height of Mount Everest, which destroyed all the buildings in a village thirty-four miles away from ground zero, could have caused third-degree burns sixty-two miles away, and shattered windows in Norway and Finland.

bombs