The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Notably: Researching recently the phyrically paradoxical phrase “celebration of life”–it is of more recent coinage than you might imagine, rising from the ashes of the 1950s–I came across this headline in the July 17, 1985 New York Times, page 14 : “A Celebration of Life on Site of First Atom Blast 40 Years Ago.” The story was datelined TRINITY SITE, and written the previous day from the place where Oppenheimer’s boys and a few women set off the first human (inhuman?) nuclear explosion in history in that New Mexico desert that until then had gone nameless, at least in white men’s atlases, but likely not in the obliterated memories of their predecessors. There had been a gathering at the Trinity site to mark the 40th anniversary of the explosion. The Army forbade demonstrations. Those were the heady days of the Reagan administration, when we were not a little scared shitless that he would make Trinity sites of all of us (less than a year before he’d joked about nuking the Soviet Union). But it allowed prayers, and on the first Saturday in October it allowed the Almogordo Chamber of Commerce to sponsor caravans of visitors “to the site to drum up publicity for the town.” That July 16 an ecumenical group gathered “at the spot where many people feel that man first put global death within his reach,” as Iver Peterson, the reporter, wrote. The Times, whose masthead was still 13 men to one woman, and she just a VP of “systems,” thrown in there like an errant subway token, had not yet learned to respect women’s majority share in civilizations. And anyway hadn’t Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s mistress, killed herself six months before the explosion? A thousand people had gathered at Trinity, some of them quoted: “I figured this bomb got me home two or three years sooner,” a veteran said. But why Trinity? “No one seemed to know why J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the bomb-building effort, chose that name,” Peterson wrote. Trinity is the Catholic doctrine about the nature of god–father, son and holy spirit. It’s given us some of the greatest icons in Byzantine history, one of which I still cherish from my childhood, though the concept seems to me a form of religious equivalent to burlesque–splendid so far as it goes, but let’s not massacre each other over it as we, alas, continue to do. The association of Trinity with the first atomic bomb blast is the continuation of that absurdity. Is that why the site bore the name? It so happened that Richard Rhodes–whose childhood had been more Trinity Site than trinity–answered that question the following year. He was in 1985 finishing The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won him the triple crown of American publishing–Pulitzer, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award. He relates the naming of the site in a 1962 letter to Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan Project for the Army. Groves thought Oppenheimer had picked the name because it’s often ascribed to rivers and peaks in the American West. “I did suggest it,” Oppenheimer wrote, “but not on [that] ground… Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation:

As West and East
In all flatt Maps–and I am one–are one,
So death doth touch the Resurrection.”

Rhodes goes on: “The poem was Donne’s ‘Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse,’ and among its subtleties it construes a complementarity that parallels the complementarity of the bomb that [Niels] Bohr had recently revealed to Oppenheimer. […]  That dying leads to death but  might also lead to resurrection–as the bomb for Bohr and Oppenheimer was a weapon of death that might also end war and redeem mankind–is one way the poem expresses the paradox.” Maybe. Though when I think of Trinity, my thoughts are more like the nuclear mushroom cloud’s approximation of a scrambled brain where too many synapses collide. I think of my childhood, my mother’s love of the Trinity, of the explosion, of the reaction of Kenneth Bainbridge, who directed the Trinity explosion, after the blast (“now we are all sons of bitches”), and of course my favorite, of Trinity, the character Terence Hill brought to life in a series of spaghetti westerns with Bud Spencer and Henry Fonda in the 1970s–“They Call Me Trinity,” “Trinity Is Still My Name,” and “My Name Is Nobody,” a movie that formed my thinking more than the Book of Job and the Psalms combined, not just because of the Ennio Morricone score, but for, among other synapses of Revelation, this one line Trinity pulls off in (I think) Henry Fonda’s Beauregard’s direction: “The secret of a long life is to try not to shorten it.” I doubt we can say that what began at Trinity is the very opposite of that spaghetti wisdom.  Even more ironically, one of the scenes was shot on location at Acoma in New Mexico, the ancient pueblo atop a mesa overlooking a plain, some 160 miles from Trinity. Trinity is attending the funeral of an Indian chief, and Beauregard is looking for his brother, who Trinity finds in a grave. 

—P.T.

 

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We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

–J. Robert Oppenheimer after the Trinity explosion, July 16, 1945, quoted in Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986).

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