Trinity from the Department of Defense
On Tuesday we spoke of Americans on the moon, and safely home again. And by the way, the first thing done on the moon that day, 50 years ago, was to thank God and take communion. A very American response.
Then, yesterday we spoke of just how revolutionary America was, and how that idea has spread in the last 80 or so years.
But there was another anniversary, last Tuesday, an amazing thing, which ties into each of the above stories because last Tuesday was the 74th anniversary of the Trinity Test.
Nobody talks much about it, because it, like the Minutemen silos standing guard, and the boomers patrolling, are an ugly fact of life. That there are people out there who don’t want you to be free, they would, in fact, prefer you dead.
J. Christian Adams over at PJ Media does a good job of explaining.
Today is the anniversary of one of the most significant events in human history. While later this week we will celebrate the Apollo 11 visit to the moon, July 16 stands apart.
But Google “Trinity” or nuclear, and you’ll hardly find a mention today about what happened on July 16, 1945, in a remote corner of New Mexico.
On that day, America detonated the first atomic bomb. The Trinity test was successful. The world would never be the same.
One observer of the blast felt they were at the “bottom of an ocean of light. We were bathed in it from all directions. The light withdrew into the bomb as if the bomb sucked it up. Then it turned purple and blue and went up and up and up.”
Cyril Smith, a British scientist eyewitness to the blast had “a momentary question as to whether we had done more than we intended.”
Yet the popular culture has obscured other ramifications of the Big Bang in New Mexico. The history of Europe is a history of marauding armies. So is the history of the world. While pop culture is filled with tales of madmen and madness, like Dr. Strangelove or the absurd ABC special The Day After, the opposite has been true. While Ultravox and Peter Paul and Mary sang of looming nuclear destruction, it hasn’t happened. […]
But that’s the point of today’s anniversary. Trinity was 74 years ago. Seventy-four years. Find another period of seventy-four years where the world has enjoyed the peace and stability between major powers that has endured since that hot July day in 1945. Perhaps this was America’s blessing to the world. Had Hitler, Hirohito, or the murderous Stalin obtained it first, the world would be a very different place today. And for that, July 16 is a day of profound historical importance for which the entire world can be thankful.
And so, here we are, only four lifetimes from being hardscrabble, subsistence farmers along the Atlantic coast, going barefoot in the snow, into battle against the greatest empire of the age, to being the keeper of the greatest secret of the age, the ability to destroy all the people in the world.
And the result of that gift of God? For 74 years, the major powers of the world have not been at war. To be sure there have been people killed, skirmishings, and minor powers squabbling. But there has been no Franco Prussian War, no Crimea, no Great War.
Pretty good sheriff, America has been so far. So we’ll see if it continues, or if the enemies of freedom, who gather their forces, all around the world, can overthrow the Pax Americana, or if the free peoples of the world can contrive to stay that way. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.