60 Years Pasts, The Nuclear Age Begins

60 years ago today the world entered a new era of history. The Trinity test of the first atomic bomb 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 here. Here's a Trinity tag.