One of the questions one might find in a quiz is 'where and when was the first atomic bomb detonated?' It is so ingrained on my mind that the Hiroshima bomb was dropped on the Feast of the Transfiguration, that I can easily remember that date - 6th August 1945. Some believe that the atomic age started that day, but there are others who seem to have forgotten what happened. I was once involved in a discussion with someone who had been an officer on a Polaris submarine. He spoke passionately about the value of a nuclear deterrent. It is telling, he said, that no nuclear weapons have ever been deployed in warfare. My reply was to ask him whether he thought that the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would agree with him, that no nuclear weapons had ever been deployed in war. In fact, if we want to mark the start of the atomic age, the date is 5.30am on 16th July 1945. It was at that time and on that date that the first atomic bomb was detonated at Alamogordo in New Mexico, USA. The name given to the test was 'Trinity'. This July we commemorate the seventieth anniversary of that event. Why was the name 'Trinity' chosen as the code name for this event? It is said that Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, chose the name because of a poem by John Donne, the poet who was also a Member of Parliament and Dean of St.Paul's in the first half of the Seventeenth Century. On witnessing the blast, Oppenheimer later said that a verse from the Hindu scriptures came to his mind: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one." It is interesting that the unlocking of such mighty power, power inherent in the very matter of creation, should evoke religious language. Humankind had always sought to unlock the meaning of life and here, in the splitting of the atom, the very forces of creation had been unleashed. Yet we are faced with a moral choice here. The possession of such power opens the way to the seemingly unlimited supply of clean energy through fusion reactions, as well as such medical treatments as radiotherapy. It is the radioactive decay of plutonium which is powering the New Horizons spacecraft, which is due to flay past Pluto on 14th July. But at the same time it was nuclear fission, in the form of bombs, which incinerated much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed so many people seventy years ago. Since that time the nuclear arms race has eaten up so much of our resources and our present world suddenly seems all the more unstable, with much nuclear material now on the back market and so many people seeking to develop their own bombs. We face the choice of continuing to be driven by our own games of power and domination or of rediscovering the Divine at the heart of creation and being transformed by that power. The true meaning of life lies in our relationship with God. The power released from becoming attuned to that power is the kind of brilliance which shone forth from the transfiguration of Jesus. As we reflect on a world which seems to be crumbling into a morass of violence and hatred, there is, if we seek it, a Power at the heart of creation which can make all things new.
