War and the Modern World

At 5:30 on the morning of 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert, the first atomic bomb, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, was exploded as a test for the first such aerial explosion to be utilized on the Empire of Japan. On witnessing the first massive atomic explosion, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the team of scientists that produced the bomb, immediately discerned its terrible potential. He realized that neither he nor the modern world could avoid the horrific ramifications of a world in which modern science was clearly the handmaiden of war. Like Krishna in the Hindu sacred epic, Bhavagad Gita, he could not escape the sad fact that: “I am become death/ the destroyer of worlds.”

In the final analysis, the Alamogordo blast provided humankind with a weapon of such destructive dimensions that it could potentially render much of the Earth's environment too toxic for human life. When the advancement of military technology gave men the very real possibility of killing off their fellows in unprecedented numbers, international law was called upon to formulate new ethical standards for human battlefields, in response to a movement toward ever-more complex implements of warfare that seemed to steadily lessen human control over war-making.