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Trinity test
Trinity was the first test of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States on July 16, 1945, at a location 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what is now White Sands Missile Range, headquartered near Alamogordo. Trinity was a test of an implosion-design plutonium bomb—the same type of weapon used on Nagasaki, Japan, a few weeks later. The detonation was equivalent to the explosion of around 20 kilotons of TNT, and is usually considered as the beginning of the Atomic Age.
Mythology in Modern American History
As Los Alamos director J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the demonstration, he later said that a line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita came to mind:
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.[6]
Test director Kenneth Bainbridge replied to Oppenheimer, "Now we are all sons of bitches." According to Oppenheimer's brother, Frank, Oppenheimer simply said, "It worked."
Variants on this quotation exist, both by Oppenheimer and by others. A more common translation of the passage, from Arthur Ryder (from whom Oppenheimer studied Sanskrit at Berkeley in the 1930s), is:
Death am I, and my present task
Destruction. (11:32)
Since the Gita's first translation into English in 1785, most experts have translated not "Death" but instead "Time". A further elaboration of the supposed Oppenheimer quote often cited is taken from Robert Jungk's 1958 Brighter than a Thousand Suns:
If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst into the sky,
that would be like
the splendor of the Mighty One—
I am become Death, the shatterer of Worlds.
For an extensive discussion of the quote, its various translations, and its various reported forms, see James A. Hijiya, "The Gita of Robert Oppenheimer" Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 144:2 (June 2000).
See Also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner
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Is there really a difference between urban legend and mythology?
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