“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These words were spoken by Robert Oppenheimer on the occasion of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He named the weapon Trinity after a John Donne poem.  Oppenheimer is seen as the “father” of the atomic bomb though he was not comfortable with that honorific. Two years after the Trinity explosion, he said, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatements can quite extinguish, we physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

Today, we live with that legacy of the real possibility of destroying our world because of nuclear weapons.  And even though we might prefer not to think about this, we must, for not to do so most certainly means we will continue to build these monstrous weapons at our own peril.

Please join Rev. Harold Beu for a special program marking the 78th anniversary of the Trinity Nuclear Test and reflecting on its terrible legacy.

Please read through our Covid-19 Gathering Guidelines before joining us in person.

For those who prefer to watch at home, this service will be live-streamed via Facebook and a video recording will be uploaded YouTube.

Topics: Peace