Twenty-five years ago this week, an instant before 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the atomic age began at a place code-named Trinity, in a remote section of a New Mexico desert called Jornada del Muerto—Journey of Death. William Laurence of the New York Times, the only journalist to witness the world's first explosion of an atomic bomb, wrote later that he felt as if he had been present at the dawn of creation, when the Lord said, "Let there be light." What came to the mind of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was a fragment from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."
Neither is yet entirely prophetic. Nuclear energy has hardly brought to the earth the blessings of the sun, but neither has man—so far—made use of his power to destroy the planet he inhabits. For a quarter of a century now, he has lived with the Bomb, and since the catharsis of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, most Americans have given nuclear Armageddon little thought. A number of big companies, among them Jersey Standard and Shell Oil, went to great expense a few years back to secure bombproof alternate headquarters for use in case of nuclear attack. Now that trend is fading. The Bekins moving company, which recently pitched to more than 60 big California companies a $10 million facility it plans to build ("the most advanced corporate survival center yet designed." says the brochure), has so far recruited not a single shelter seeker. This may signify that the nuclear nightmare is waning. Or it may mean that Americans have come to accept the notion that there is no real defense against doomsday, if it ever comes.