The Daily Parker

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Happy birthday, Fat Man?

Seventy years ago today, the United States detonated the world's first nuclear weapon:

On Thursday, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, part of the Department of Energy, will commemorate the 70th anniversary of its greatest scientific accomplishment: the first successful test of an atomic bomb.

The anniversary of that explosion, which happened about 210 miles south of here at a site named Trinity, will be marked in a low-key fashion at the lab. There will be a roundtable discussion in an auditorium.

Well, that sounds exciting. We're still the only country to have waged nuclear war, and we still have more nuclear weapons than anyone else except Russia. At least we're not still in the days of my childhood when we had over 10,000 bombs.

It's still debated whether the Manhattan Project saved more lives than it cost in 1945. (I think it did—and I'm very, very glad the Nazi nuclear effort went in completely the wrong direction, preventing them from getting the bomb first.)

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