TRUE AND FALSE DAWNS: THE LEGACY OF THE TRINITY TEST AND THE PROMISE OF THE NUCLEAR BAN TREATY
On July 16, 1945, the most dangerous era in human history – the nuclear age – opened with the false dawn of an atomic fireball in the New Mexico desert, the ‘Trinity’ test of the secret Allied Superweapon soon to inaugurate its 80-year Reign of Terror with the destruction of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, including nearly 40,000 children, sending cancers and other diseases cascading through bodies and generations.
That radioactive shockwave began with the Trinity test, creating a new category of afflicted humanity known as ‘Downwinders,’ exposed to the lethal ‘decay products’ of the explosion. During a Cold War that the atomic bombings helped set in motion, over 2,000 nuclear tests, most of them far larger than Trinity, were conducted, over 500 – prior to the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) of 1963 – in the atmosphere, causing worldwide and irreversible contamination and creating huge numbers of ‘Downwinders’, mainly the Indigenous peoples whose lands and waters were ‘sacrificed’ in the name of national security, but also thousands of soldiers and sailors negligently or deliberately exposed to fall-out.
Relentless nuclear testing fueled the ‘overkill’ nuclear arms race, driving the expansion of the ‘Mushroom Cloud Clubs’ from one to nine (China, France, Russia, UK, US, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea). And though the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) seeks to consign the era of testing to the past, the gates of that Hell remain wide open, with no fewer than six of the nuclear nine (China, India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, US) refusing to join the treaty, Russia revoking its membership, and increasingly open talk among American hawks of the ‘need’ to prepare the Nevada test site for a grand, 21st century re-opening.
The long practice and enduring legacy of testing has also massively complicated efforts to achieve deep nuclear cuts, paving the way to the nuclear-weapon-free world enshrined as the goal of both the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and the 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the ‘Ban Treaty’ – supported by two-thirds of UN states, excluding only the nuclear-armed and their allies – made possible by the tireless activism and excoriating witness of the survivors of nuclear use, testing, and the many other violences of the nuclear world.
Addressing the Second Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW in 2023, an ‘Affected Communities Statement’ argued rightly that “nuclear weapons do harm every day. Frim the mining of uranium to the creation of the bomb and the everlasting radioactive waste, our planet carries the scars of so many nuclear sacrifice zones,” adding that “nuclear colonialism has disproportionately impacted Indigenous Peoples and marginalized communities.”
The damage has been so deep that some of those scars will never be healed or wrongs righted. Nuclear justice, however – in the form of reparations, victim assistance, survivor empowerment, and environmental remediation – can take many meaningful forms, some of them set out in the ‘positive obligations’ provisions of the TPNW. And the most meaningful move of all would be towards ‘Global Zero’ – a planet no longer overshadowed by the Cloud – in coming years.
Many realistic, detailed roadmaps exist, charting a plausible, verifiable course to a nuclear-weapon-free world no later than 2045, the centenary of Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. The only alternative, almost certainly, to Global Zero is Global Ground Zero: not 80 or 100 more years of an environmentally disastrous, politically corrupt, morally corrosive nuclear ‘peace,’ but the “final failure”, to quote President Kennedy, of a nuclear war potentially sealing the fate of the Earth.
On this sombre 80th anniversary of the false dawn of Trinity, Peace Quest Cape Breton joins its small voice to the growing global chorus demanding that all states seize the opportunity afforded by new light on humanity’s horizon: the ‘true dawn’ of the Nuclear Ban Treaty.
Note
As part of Peace Quest’s commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the atomic age, we are publishing a reflection, Revisiting Trinity, inspired by the extraordinary journey of one survivor, Kyoko Hayashi, to the Trinity site from Nagasaki, devastated by the monstrous force first released on July 16, 1945, ‘the day the sun rose twice’ – and humanity’s greatest test began. Please see our website at
