Ed Simon at Lit Hub:
Even if the singular moment in which apocalyptic fire was first grasped by human hands occurred at the evocatively-named Trinity Test Site in Alamogordo, New Mexio three weeks before August 6, it wasn’t until Hiroshima and the second bombing at Nagasaki three days later that the world was introduced the Manhattan Project’s implications. The construction of the bomb is itself a great American tragedy, this assortment of brilliant physicists gathered in the desert primeval to unlock the mysteries of creation in the furtherance of destroying part of that creation. That most were working on the project for objectively noble reasons in a war against authoritarianism only compounds the tragedy. A figure like J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the project, becomes as mythic as if he were Prometheus and Pandora, Frankenstein and Faustus. Just as the heat of Trinity forged sand into glass, that same device (and all after it) transubstantiated myth into reality. Appropriate, that test-site name Trinity, as Oppenheimer drew its name from the first lines of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV,” with its description of a triune God both deity and man as paradoxical as matter that’s also energy, of the infinite power of a divine “force to break, blow, burn.”
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