60 years ago today the world entered a new era of history. The
[Trinity test of the first atomic
bomb]1 took place in
Alamogordo, New Mexico.
It seems like it should be much longer in time since those
momentous events. Sixty years is such a short amount of
time. I marvel at my own birth a scant twenty-six years
after the blast. My own twenty-sixth birthday has come and
gone and I wonder if I would have had the same courage to
have a child at that age, in the middle of the Cold War, when
the liklihood of mutual assured destruction was so much more
real. My school years at the beginning of the Reagan
administration were wracked by fears of nuclear destruction
as the U.S. denounced the evil empire, increased the defense
budget and deployed missiles in Europe.
I’m also struck by the fact that the global war on terrorism
has now lasted longer than World War 2. I have no particular
nostalgia for the greatest generation but the irony of
comparing our current conflict to World War 2 should not be
missed. Calling the current situation a ‘war’ seems to be
the height of hubris when compared to the sacrifices
made by the servicemen of WW2.
I notice, too, that very few people have marked the events at
Trinity in the blogosphere, at least according to
this Technorati search. The one example I found was
