In some places in Africa the grasshoppers start their cacophony at dusk. In other places the firefly come out. In Alice, the gunfire started. Once it is fully dark we would never venture off the University Campus. Sometimes we would hear of murders, gunfights in bars, or the ‘taxi war’ which would have accounted for some of the shots. It was generally believed it was drunks showing off or shooting at the stars. But we never found out what most of the shooting was about.
On night there was much more firing of automatic weapons than usual.
In the morning Dr Morrison asked, “What was all the shooting about last night?. Carol said it was because it was an odd numbered day of the month”. “She just means there was probably no good reason, I explained”. (Americans often seem to have difficuly with flippancy)
“Trinity was Dangerous”, said Phil. I was taken aback. I had just met Gabriel but I could not imagine Phil and Gabriel discussing the threefold nature of God. I knew that ‘Trinity’ was the code name of the first Atomic Bomb. As for that, how could it not be dangerous? “It was triggered by the gun from a tank”, he continued. “How could any nuclear weapon not be dangerous?” I asked.
Conversation closed. I could not find it easy to talk to a man who had forty one years earlier set the fuse on a bomb which killed one hundred thousand people. It still worries me: “How can a man build a nuclear weapon, based on some of his own calculations of the critical mass, when the ultimate outcome of an unconstrained chain reaction was unknown?
I avoided the subject.
I read some years later that Phil had travelled in the back of a car with the enriched uranium core of Trinity to the Los Alamos test site.