TABLET MAGAZINE
by Warren Kozak
July 16, 2015

One of history’s most important dividing lines was etched in a remote and desolate part of New Mexico exactly 70 years ago today, and the world knew nothing about it at the time. Ask most people when the nuclear age began and they will probably answer Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945. It did not. Three weeks earlier, on July 16, the world’s leading scientists, including Lawrence, Fermi, Teller, and, of course, Oppenheimer, assembled in the middle of the night at an abandoned ranch near Alamogordo…Oddly, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, which brought an end to the Cold War, did not erase the fear of nuclear war. Just the opposite. The world entered a new, more complex era, with countries like Pakistan and North Korea gaining nuclear capabilities. Now Iran, one of the world’s leading sponsors of terror, is poised to gain access to the most deadly technologies that human beings have ever invented. READ MORE