WASHINGTON: The world changed forever, at just before dawn, 60 years ago this Saturday, July 16. Deep in the northern New Mexico desert, the United States test-fired its new atomic weapon, and in a flash, mankind had the means of its own potential destruction.

The blast’s terrible beauty, which bathed nearby mountains in blinding light, sent military and political consequences coursing down the decades, spawning a Cold War arms race and fears of nuclear extinction.

“The whole human species has been living with the threat of annihilation ever since,” said Peter Kuznick, a history professor specializing in nuclear issues at American University in Washington.

Nuclear headaches still dominate US foreign policy — as Japan prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few weeks after the test at Trinity Site, New Mexico.

The United States is mired in the aftermath of an invasion of Iraq it justified by saying that in a new age of terror, it could not wait for a ‘mushroom cloud’ to establish whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction program.

The Bush administration is also preoccupied with what it says is the quest for nuclear weapons by its ‘axis of evil” foe Iran.

North Korea meanwhile has cranked up a nuclear production line which puts the world’s most dangerous weapons in the hands of one of its most impulsive and unpredictable leaders, Kim Jong-Il.

As silence reclaimed the New Mexico desert, 60 years ago, scientists behind the Manhattan Project, as the atomic weapons program was known, were left to question the deadly fruit of their labours.

It was up to their political masters to wrestle with the epochal decision over whether to use their terrible new weapon.

“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world,” President Harry S. Truman wrote in his diary on July 25, 1945, just three months after succeeding late president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley era, after Noah and his fabulous ark.”

The successful test confounded all expectations and two similar bombs were already en route to the Pacific, to be used a few weeks later in the world’s first, and so far only atomic attacks.

Before the fateful raids, some of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project had pleaded with President Truman not to turn their invention loose.

“The success which we have achieved in the development of nuclear power is fraught with infinitely greater dangers than were all the inventions of the past,” they wrote in the ‘Franck Report’, signed by seven scientists.

The group urged President Truman to lay on a demonstration of the bomb’s awful power to scare Japan into surrendering, thereby saving tens of thousands of lives.

Other members of the Manhattan Project however, including Robert Oppenheimer, considered the father of the atomic bomb, argued Washington had no choice but to use it.

Although their plea was unsuccessful, the Franck report correctly predicted the chain of events which followed : an arms race with the Soviet Union, and the subsequent quest by other states for nuclear weapons.

Six decades on, the Franck report’s warnings seem eerily prescient, as US policymakers confront the modern threat from nuclear proliferation, and fears terrorists could one day threaten a US city with a rudimentary nuclear device.

“In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor,” the Franck report warned.

“He can place his infernal machines in advance in all our major cities and explode them simultaneously, thus destroying a major part of our industry, and a large part of our population.”

President Truman’s own words, again in his diary for July 25, also seemed tinged with irony, as US foes scramble for nuclear weapons — partly it seems as insurance against the ‘regime change’ fostered in Iraq.

“It seems to me the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful,” Mr Truman wrote, about the new atomic bomb.—AFP