Trinity

"My visit to the Trinity bombsite was full of contrasts and contradictions-a people-filled oasis in a seemingly barren landscape was once ground zero of a deadly explosion. The families and groups who peacefully perused the grounds, examining rough gems of trinitite, seemed more like archeologists mining the remnants of a distant world-not the one in which they lived, worked, went about their daily lives. But what disturbed me most of all, was a smooth and intact replica of the Fat Man bomb, similar to the one exploded over Hiroshima. I couldn’t stop staring at its harmonious and pleasing form-the shape of the flesh-colored casing so closely mimicking the shell of an egg. I began to think of the men who created that form-piecing it together like a sculpture, keenly extracting and decoding nature’s intricate systems and recombining them. The bomb seemed both a scientific and aesthetic triumph, its egg-like shape ideally constructed to contain a potentially energetic life-a perfect marriage of form and content. Then to understand that it was not a deliverer of life, but a capsule of violence, pain, and death-ripping apart families, terrorizing our psyches. This was the deepest and most disturbing contrast-that we cannot control our impulse to create, even if it also means to obliterate."

Jennifer, Manchester, Massachusetts

http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/trinity/index.html