by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm and Michael Gallagher
Published by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Hardback publication in 2012.
Paperback publication in 2013.
. . .
"It will outlast our dreams."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Trinity is a nonfiction comic that attempts to tell the story of the birth of nuclear weapons in about one-hundred fifty pages of black and white sequential art. It offers an ensemble cast of fascinating historical figures-J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, President Truman, Stalin, Hirohito-in addition to an expertly illustrated course in Nuclear Weapons 101. Trinity functions like a documentary in comic book form, where you can linger over the pictures and text as long as you need to absorb the narrative. The style is concrete, with intriguing visual flourishes and abstractions here and there to depict the intricacies of nuclear physics.
Writer-artist Jonathan Fetter-Vorm acknowledges in the bibliography that one-hundred fifty is perhaps an insufficient number of pages to do it justice, and does not offer Trinity as the final word on the subject. But I do think Trinity is a good enough primer, a place to start for sure. It offers a detailed systematic overview of how the interplay of science, politics, warfare, militarism, genocide, and empire contributed to the invention of nuclear weapons. Yes, J. Robert Oppenheimer and his iconic eyes play their part, but he is not necessarily the protagonist in this telling. Oppenheimer is portrayed as a visionary, but also as a scientist building upon discoveries of earlier generations. Oppenheimer is but one component-a crucial one, to be sure-but just one component in the vast machine that led to the history changing detonation at Alamogordo.
Other components include:
Hitler's anti-semitic Holocaust, which drove Jewish scientists to flee Europe as a matter of survival. Oppenheimer was a patriotic Jewish-American who, along with other scientists, feared the development of a Nazi Bomb. Therefore, the Americans needed to achieve a nuclear arsenal first in order to launch a decapitation strike against Germany's leadership, or so the thinking was at the time.
Imperial Japan's massive military violence against Asia, particularly its invasion of China, and its attack on Pearl Harbor. It should also be noted that Japan's Imperial leaders did not operate according to democracy, and blithely expected every last man, woman, and child to be willing to die for their ambitions. After Germany's defeat, the ferocity of Japan's war machine made the Americans weigh the costs of invasion-which was calculated to cost many thousands of American lives- against dropping two nuclear bombs-which would cost no American lives.
The fanciful notion that a nuke could discourage all future wars by virtue of a terrifying demonstration effect that would quell militaristic ambition in the hearts of men. This sounds satirically idealistic, but some thought this could be the case. I guess you could make the argument that as of this writing in the year 2023 that since all out nuclear war has so far been avoided maybe this isn't such a crazy idea. But . . . when I put the words down like this . . . it still strikes me as completely fuckin' nuts.
Another set of essential components are the natural physical laws that allow a nuclear explosion to exist in reality, not just in theory. Plutonium is often described as not existing in Nature, that it is "man-made." But where does "Man" or "Humankind" come from? Nature, by way of cosmic evolution, the ultimate process that created and continues to create our Universe, our Reality, Us, the human species on planet Earth. Therefore, one could argue that Humankind's production of plutonium does not magically break the chain of "natural" causes and effects. Trinity is, in some sense, about stripping away the Romanticisms of our ideas about what is natural and what is unnatural, particularly in its stark final pages which contemplate the ubiquity and invisibility of radiation, and the seeming impossibility of turning away from the dreadful knowledge of the Bomb, and all that it entails. We usually only fret about the morality of whether we should do something just because we can after we've uncorked Pandora's Jar. Sucks, but it's true.
Another disturbing component is the brutal acceptance of the mass slaughter of civilian populations during World War II as a normalizing force. Although Hiroshima was labeled a military target by war planners, the reality is that most of the people killed were civilians. Trinity also points out that Curtis LeMay's nonnuclear firebombing of Tokyo had an even higher civilian body count, but the psychological resonance of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki obscured this reality in the popular imagination. Note, also, a theme of desensitization to escalating scales of mass slaughter. During the Cold War, nuclear weapons proliferated among Capitalists and Communists to the point of offering a permanent risk of human extinction either by malice or incompetence or some mixture of the two-a reality we live with to this day.
Trinity . . . it's a lot. Maybe it's even too much. Especially when you remember that the nukes are still out there and ready to go in numbers that would certainly be a near instantaneous Game Over for humans if launched.
So, I dunno . . . write to your Congressperson or Senator?
Sure.
Activities.
Good to do.
