The Gadget, Destroying Worlds, Part II

ROBERT J. OPPENHEIMER chose the new Mexico desert as the place to build a secret city, build the bomb, and test the bomb, which he from the start called "the gadget", because his parents had sent him to a "Dude Ranch" there to escape New York City in the summers of his childhood, and he liked the scenery. One reason's as good as another, one supposes. Also, because the area was considered to be largely uninhabited, which it most certinly was not, and therefore received the approval of Gen. Leslie Groves, the head of the "Manhatten Project". The city went up in a flash, as the bomb later would. Thousands of twenty and thirty somethings of both genders congregated there and miracle in less than two years, while they engaged in amorous activities and made a bunch of babies. Problem was, the area for a radius of fifty miles around Alamagordo was far from "uninhabited", it being populated by an estimated fifteen thoussnd unwitting souls, scattered among the hills and barren scrub brushed bioregion. The single bomb test, with the bomb sitting and exloding atop a one hundred foot tower, spewed lethal radiation throughout the entire area and far beyond, setting off an epidemmic of cancer which continues to this day, among the ancestors of the original victims. Nuclear radiation lingers essentially forever, and its energy disrupts cellular metabolism and reproduction, which is what cancer is. Today there is an organization of descendants of the original radiation victims, named "The Downwind Society." Hardly anyone knows about them now or knew about them at the time, in all the furor and excitement of the successful bomb test, the "successful" double bombing of Japan, and the end of the second world war. Give them and us credit for this, if nothing else: nobody ever had the temerity to call World War Two "the war to end all wars" like World War One had been called; at least in this morbid regard, we had wized up. Throughout the nineteen fifties and well into the nineteen sixties atomic bomb testing proceeded, as if wewanted to remind ourselves that we adn't lost our touch, and still knew how to kill, but needed practice. Finally, one treaty after another with the soviet Union (Russia today) put an end to it, at least ostensibly. But the damage had been done, and is still being done. A good Geiger counter can detect nuclear radiation in every human being and every living thing on this planet, courtesy nuclear technology and testing. Like Oppenheimer quoted from the Upanishads: "I am death, destroyer of worlds".