[On July 16,
1945, the first
atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site, New Mexico, an explosion with
numerous aftereffects and meanings. This week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of
such Trinity connections, leading up to a special weekend post on a foreign
film that’s also profoundly American.]
How the name
Trinity helps us think about a particularly vexed aspect of the site and history.
In 1962, Los
Alamos project member General Leslie
Groves wrote to
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory’s director, to inquire why he had
chosen the name “Trinity” for the site where the first atomic bomb would be tes\ted.
Groves wondered if it was just to keep the site’s specific location and purpose
secret, as there were a number of geographic sites in the region with the same
name. But Oppenheimer responded that it seemed to him, as he remembered his
thoughts at the time, to have had more to do with John Donne, and quoted two Donne
poems: “As West and
East/In all flat Maps—and I am one—are one,/So death doth touch the
Resurrection,” which Oppenheimer cited as a favorite poem of his and the
principal connection to the site; but, recognizing that “That still does not
make a Trinity,” he also referenced the better-known “Batter my heart, three
person’d God.”
Even without the
Donne connection, of course, the word “Trinity” has a particular, long-standing
connection to Christianity, and the Holy Trinity that forms such a central part
of the Christian faith. However, in other recollections Oppenheimer would
connect the Trinity test to the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, quoting two
different passages from the text in attempts to capture his thoughts as he
witnessed the successful explosion: “If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the
mighty one”; and, more famously, “I am become Death, the
destroyer of worlds.” And while the Donne and Christian allusions seem to
suggest that the bomb represented for Oppenheimer a logical opportunity to
reflect on death and mortality, and the limits of humanity in the face of those
eternal truths, the Hindu quotations suggest something quite different: that in
the creation of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists had
become gods in their own right, or at the very least had constructed something that
could do the work of a god (or perhaps a devil) quite effectively.
None of us can
know with any certainty what Oppenheimer or any of his peers thought or felt at
Trinity, of course; and undoubtedly, as Oppenheimer’s subsequent quotes
reflect, their perspectives evolved, shifted, and perhaps changed entirely as
the atomic age and Cold War unfolded. But if we take a step back from these
perspectives, individual and collective, the questions of faith and its
relationship to a moment and history like Trinity remain significant and
complex ones. Albert Einstein, whose letter
detailing and apologizing for his role in developing the bomb I referenced
in Wednesday’s post, famously remarked that “God does not play dice
with the universe.” The sentiment reflects, as Stephen Hawking argues in that
linked talk, the role that Einstein’s spiritual determinism played in his scientific
analyses of nature and life. Yet I can think of few metaphors more apt for the
atomic age—in which, make no mistake, we are still living today, if without the
overt reminders that the Cold War provided so frequently—than a universe of
random chance, one in which the wrong roll of the dice can have immediate and
catastrophic consequences. Can faith in a providential plan help us live in
that world? Did Oppenheimer and his peers forever alter our sense of that world
and its plans? I don’t have answers to those questions—but Trinity, in name and
reality, forces us to engage with them in any case.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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