Before dawn on 16 July 1945, at a site in the Jornada del Muerto Desert, New Mexico, a new age began.
Its sign was a light, never meant to be seen in nature, brighter than the noonday sun, purple and violet, then green and then white. And heat, searing heat, likened to opening the door of an oven, or a crematorium, with all the overtones of holocaust and perdition.
Observers, at a base camp some twenty miles away, saw the light instantly.
Traveling at three-hundred thousand kilometres a second, the light and heat crossed the desert basin in a tenth of a millisecond.
The sound and blast, traveling at a sluggardly three-hundred and forty-three metres per second, would take over a minute to reach them. Leaving them time to wonder whether what was coming was the end of the World.
J. Robert Oppenheimer later wrote that he thought of Shiva: "I am become death, destroyer of worlds."
Enrico Fermi took wagers on whether the atmosphere would ignite and incinerate the planet.
Like all beginnings, it was difficult. Uncertain. Ragged. A door briefly opened and slammed shut.
The old age of stone and certainties and faith refuses to slip away, and a new age of liquid hopes and dreams struggles to be born.
The Age of Empires gives way only reluctantly to the new age, the Atomic Age, the Age of Atomised individuals. Divine right, and the one being subsumed in the many, in the church or the state is overthrown for a new age of Gods and Monsters, of Supermen and Wonder Women.
There is an old, old Order. And the future is Anarchy.
It will mean a war.
The Great Men – and they so often are men – who once used god or blood to justify might making right, now style themselves Randian Heroes, bestriding the landscape of history on their Heroes Journeys, propelled by their own destiny, ignorant or ignoring that they tread of the backs of others.
The old lie, that you are cared for by lord and master, by Le Bon Dieu, by historical dialectic, is supplanted by the new lie that you are alone.
In the whole of the Second World War, enough fissionable material was manufactured to build just three atomic bombs. Uranium 235 was used to make the "Little Boy" that was dropped from Enola Gay to destroy Hiroshima, killing up to one hundred and forty-six thousand people. Plutonium 239 and 240 was used for the "Fat Man", dropped from the Bockscar on Nagasaki three days later, killing a further eighty thousand people. And the third, also plutonium, was for the test.
The explosion was measured at twenty-five kilotons, equivalent to twenty-five thousand tonnes of conventional TNT explosive. It fused the desert sand into green radioactive glass.
The name given to the sign was Trinity.