‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’
i.m. David Lynch, 1946-2025
At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, scientists, army personnel, and technicians donned special goggles to watch the beginning of the Atomic Age.
The bomb was dropped.
This is the water and this is the well.
Drink full and descend.
The horse is the white of the eyes
and dark within.
There was a forceful flash, a wave of heat, a stupendous shock wave, and a mushroom cloud that extended 40,000 feet into the atmosphere.
The tower was completely disintegrated and thousands of yards of surrounding desert sand was turned into a radioactive glass of a brilliant jade green color.
The bomb had worked.
This is the water and this is the well.
Drink full and descend.
The horse is the white of the eyes
and dark within.
The bright light from the Trinity test would stand out in the minds of everyone within hundreds of miles of the site. Residents in neighborhoods far away would say the sun rose twice that day. A blind girl 120 miles from the site said she saw the flash as well.
This is the water and this is the well.
Drink full and descend.
The horse is the white of the eyes
and dark within.
The deadly impact of the atomic bomb was immediate, but the effects would last for decades.
In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war.
This is the water and this is the well.
Drink full and descend.
The horse is the white of the eyes
and dark within.
The great god is not only involved in the creation, but also the dissolution.
The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
This is the water and this is the well.
Drink full and descend.
The horse is the white of the eyes
and dark within.
Rupert Loydell
Shelley Schwartz, ‘An Introduction to the Manhattan Project’, ThoughtCo., 13 September 2017. https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-atomic-the-manhattan-project-1991237
[accessed 18 January 2018]
David Lynch (dir.), Twin Peaks, series 3, episode 8 (first shown 25 June, 2017)