The site is open to the public only one weekend a year in April, and visitors are prohibited from touching the still radioactive trinitite. It’s in these broad historical terms that we should consider communicating messages over something like 300 generations.Įven now, 60 years after the test, levels of radiation at Trinity are about 10 times higher than normal background radiation. Exposure to normal levels of background radiation for most humans is measured at around 200 milliroentgens a year, the equivalent of 0.2 roentgen, as a point of comparison. After the Trinity test, that first successful detonation in New Mexico, contamination at the blast site was measured at 15 roentgen.

But the radiation emitted by a nuclear explosion is of another magnitude altogether.

Every time you take a cross-country flight for instance, you expose yourself to a bath of low-level radiation simply by being closer to space. Particles decay, atoms lose energy, and that energy is emitted in the form of radioactive waves. On a very limited scale, radiation is something that occurs naturally on Earth. The desert sand within the blast radius was superheated into a radioactive green glass, named trinitite, and a mushroom cloud blossomed over seven miles into the sky.Īs impressive as the explosion itself was, the most powerful aspect of the bomb was the invisible force of radiation. On July 16, 1945, the first nuclear blast in Earth’s history erupted with the force of 20 kilotons of TNT. The Gita, one of the most venerated Hindu religious texts, chronicles the conversations between Prince Arjuna and the God Krishna-and only the words of a God could appropriately convey the incomprehensible scale on which the United States government had acted. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists who helped design the atomic bomb, chose to quote from the Bhagavad Gita in response to the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon in the remote sands of New Mexico. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It was fitting that J.

Who sings a thousand years