16 July—Eighty years ago today (that’s 1945, kids), in the aptly named Jornada del Muerto (Day of the Dead) desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the world’s very first atomic bomb was tested. It was code-named Trinity by Los Alamos Laboratory and project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, evidently alluding to the first line of Metaphysical poet John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” In the poem Donne begs God’s—the Holy Trinity’s—intercession to escape from sin, even if it requires harsh measures. Makes sense in the circumstance. Gotta give it to Oppy. And the Jornada del Muerto desert had been given that name well before Trinity.

Trinity’s explosion was equivalent to 21 kilotons—21,000 tons—of TNT, the mushroom cloud reached an altitude of over seven miles, and the chain reaction didn’t blow up the whole planet. So the test was destructively successful and rich in radioactive contamination.

Nine years later, 1 March 1954, America’s biggest bomb ever, a thermonuclear (hydrogen) device code-named Castle Bravo (because the series of nuclear tests was called Operation Castle and Bravo is the second letter of the phonetic alphabet and Castle Bravo was the—uh—first test of the series [go figure]) was detonated over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Its yield, which turned out to be two-and-a-half times larger than the planned six megatons, was 15 megatons—15,000,000 tons of TNT and the mushroom cloud reached an altitude of 25 miles and spread out over 62 miles, contaminating a much larger area of the central Pacific. Blame the lithium.

But that was child’s play. Because on 30 October 1961 the Soviets exploded the biggest bomb ever over the Mityushikha Bay Nuclear Testing Range in the really northern Arctic. Called Vanya by the Russkies and Tsar Bomba (Emperor Bomb) by the West, the 50 megaton—50,000,000 ton—Soviet thermonuclear mother’s cloud reached 40 miles into the stratosphere, with the blast destroying everything within a 22-mile radius and causing severe damage as far as 62 miles away.

But we have nothing to worry about because of various non-proliferation and test-ban treaties—even though they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on . . .