REVISITING TRINITY: THE RACE TO CLOSE THE NUCLEAR CIRCLE OF HELL
“Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now…”
Opening of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Natural World
On July 16, 1945, the day broke twice in the New Mexico desert. At 05:29:45 Mountain Time, overwhelming the glimmerings of dawn, the world’s first atomic explosion – a flash far exceeding the sun in brilliance, equalling it in heat – took lurid shape as a vast, seething Cloud, a “turbulent red column” rapidly “growing a mushroom-like head,” as physicist Philip Morrison observed from over 20 miles away. His colleague Cyril Smith, while relieved “it worked,” entertained “a momentary question as to whether we had done more than we intended,” a qualm prompted by the unexpected untidiness of the spectacle, the rough translation of millions of equations into a new, uncontainable reality:
The obvious fact that all the reaction products were not proceeding upward in a neat ball but were lagging behind and being blown by low altitude winds over the ground in the direction of inhabited areas produced very definite reflection that this is not a pleasant weapon we have produced.
“Later reflections,” Smith added, “on the manner of defense” against the Bomb led to the realization “that a city is henceforth not the place in which to live.” “Every living thing within the radius of a mile,” historian Ferenc Morton Szasz wrote in The Day The Sun Rose Twice, “was annihilated – plants, snakes, ground squirrels, lizards, even the ants. The stench of death lingered about the area for three weeks.”
Three weeks after Trinity, the sun rose twice over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the ‘Little Boy’ uranium Bomb killing 70,000 people instantly and as many again by the end of the year, many succumbing to the ravages of those ragged ‘reaction products.’ Three days later, the ‘Fat Man’ plutonium weapon – the version of the ‘Supersun’ tested in New Mexico – ignited over Nagasaki, leaving another 70,000 dead and triggering similar cascades of suffering.
In February 1945, 14-year-old Kyoko Hayashi returned to her birthplace of Nagasaki, her family seeking comparative sanctuary from the horrors of war in Japanese-occupied China. Six months later, a student forced to work in a steel factory less than a mile from the epicentre of the blast, she “ran,” physically unscathed but soon to be poisoned, “with the pack of people whose hands, feet, faces no longer looked human.” “Like ants on a midsummer road,” she remembered, “there was a line” in a “burned field” where a major landmark, the Urakami Roman Catholic Cathedral, had stood. But the whole city “was completely ruined. I could see all the way to the sea. The only things higher than the ground were people. I ran and ran, glancing at scenes lit by fire.”
As described by her friend and translator, the choreographer and dancer Eiko Otake, Hayashi “travelled for nine hours through Nagasaki on foot,” trying to reach her family on the outskirts, “eating radiation-cooked vegetables along the way.” Though, “as she fled,” she “saw many dead and dying bodies that had been crushed, burned, and wounded,” even worse was the haunting ‘presence’ of the disappeared, the instantaneously erased poetry of innumerable lives: “Many people died screaming while many others vanished without a sound. Looking back on those deaths, Hayashi says that the atomic bomb deprived the victims not only of their lives, but also their ‘own personal deaths,’ which, as humans, they were entitled to experience.”
Like so many atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha, Hayashi bore witness, through acute radiation sickness and personal hardship, to the horror she witnessed, devoting her successful career as a novelist to chronicling that day that silenced so many. As the end of the century approached, however, she decided that one major step on her journey remained, a leap of faith in healing across the gulf separating the ‘birth’ of the Bomb from the deaths and distress it inflicted. “Trinity,” Hayashi realized, “is the starting point of my August 9. From Trinity to Trinity – If I can make that journey, I can hold August 9 within my life cycle.”
In the fall of 1999 she leapt, landing through the nuclear looking-glass in the National Atomic Museum in Santa Fe, en route to the Trinity site. In a “souvenir store that sold things like T-shirts with prints of mushroom clouds” – though none, of course, showing the results of the Cloudburst – she “noticed pins in a basket,” and “among the pins of American flags…pins of Fat Man”. “The real Fat Man,” she wrote, “was a big bomb with a diameter of 1.52 meters, a length of 3.2 meters, and a weight of 4.5 tons. The pins were designed on a scale of 1/100.” Yet while the pins literally minimized the real dimensions of the Bomb (and, by extension, the Bombing), the explosive core of ‘Fat Man’, sufficient to strike out a whole city, was little bigger than a baseball, suggesting the grotesque wrenching of scale involved – the miniaturization not just of warheads but realities – in the split-second creation of a surreally small world.
Much of Hayashi’s memoir, Trinity to Trinity, is a meditation on this aesthetically critical question of dimension. Approaching Trinity’s Ground Zero, for example, she reflects on the New Mexico paintings of a favourite artist, Georgia O’Keefe, exploring the profound correspondences between landscape and body: “I know only a few pictures in which O’Keefe directly paints human shapes. But in the depictions of flowers and mountains…I see the body of a girl or a mature woman. … Nature reflects a body and a body merges with nature. Thus a body transforms into a mountain or flower nectar as if to regain a life. Life is a circle…”
And this is the circle that Trinity broke, replaced with the crater she finally reached, eerily retracing her August 9 steps: “I turned my face to look around. As far as I could see was a field with no place to hide. The only things higher than the ground were humans, the fences surrounding the Trinity site, red mountains on the horizon, and one thing more. In the center, in front of me, is a memorial,” a black lava obelisk simply naming the day an obscene flash “burned the helpless mountains, and shot up into the sky”. “Without time to defend and fight back,” Hayashi wrote in revelation, “the wilderness was forced into silence”:
Until now, I have thought it was we humans who were the first atomic bomb victims on Earth. I was wrong. Here are my senior hibakusha. Here they are but cannot cry or yell.
Tears filled my eyes.
*
Strangely, Hayashi doesn’t mention Georgia O’Keefe’s celebrated ‘Pelvis Series,’ painted while staying at the ‘Ghost House’ ranch close to the Los Alamos atomic laboratory during World War Two. In her 2023 article ‘Deserted Myths and Nuclear Realities,’ British academic Emily Faux writes that before Trinity, O’Keefe’s focus was on painting the clear sky through the opening in the animal pelvic bones she found on her hikes, “the Blue”, O’Keefe wrote in 1944, “that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.” Then, as Faux tells the story, “a bright and savage light filled the sky” on that false dawn of July 16, and when she “returned to her art she again painted the sky, though now it was alive with reds and yellows”. “To me,” Faux writes, “this image” –
exemplifies the nuclear sublime: the at once beautiful and frightening, the astonishing and terrifying. It reminds me of the peculiar anecdote that in the event of nuclear war the sky will be filled with the most spectacular sunsets visible all through the day and night. Dust and aerosol would scatter the sun’s rays and produce vivid sunset effects, like the intense yellow red in O’Keefe’s work. Truly a sight to behold, but one too costly to witness.
*
Kyoko Hayashi died in 2017, the year 122 states adopted the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), a diplomatic breakthrough inspired by a civil society coalition – the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) – itself inspired by the resister-survivors, the far-more-than-victims, of nuclear use and testing.
Every day since Trinity, humanity has faced a choice between global Ground Zero and the Global Zero of a nuclear-weapon-free world. The new ‘Ban Treaty’ opens a path, following in the footsteps of the hibakusha, to close the vicious circle of the atomic age.
