The End of the World, now in High Definition

A few weeks back, Jezebel and I went to Boston to celebrate St. Patty's Day and visit with a few friends. One of them had recently bought himself a 60-inch, high definition television. After many hours of drinking (the bar ran through 22 kegs of Guiness, for starters), we headed back to his house for the obligatory late-night drunken foodfest. Mmmmm, hot pretzels.

Now obviously we had to check out the TV, and we ended up watching Finding Nemo before I stupidly asked if he had high-def cable. It just so happened that he had saved a Discovery Channel documentary that was done in high-def so as to show off the monster TV's capabilities. What was the documentary you ask?

Trinity: The Atomic Bomb Movie.

I've seen video of the nuclear tests before, but I've never watched them in widescreen high-definition, narrated by William Shatner and set to an original score by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.* We sat there in utter, horrified silence as bomb after bomb was detonated, in striking 60-inch clarity and nad-shaking 500-watt surround sound.

After watching that documentary I was filled with a sense of awestruck horror. It's unbelievable (and yet believable) that these scientists were sitting around in swimsuits and sunglasses, watching the end of the world unfold in front of them as if it was another day at the office. Now to be fair, the scientists were hardly ignorant of the implications of their work, but they had no idea what was going to happen when they set one of these monstrosities off. Some of them actually thought they were going to ignite the oxygen in the atmosphere and literally turn the earth into a giant fireball.

A few days ago, a blogger named Joshua Ellis published the report of a project on his site whereby he collected small donations from readers that would be used to fund a trip to the Trinity test site in near Los Alamos. The site is only opened to the public twice a year for 3 hours at a time. He writes a very detailed account of his trip to Los Alamos and provides a number of pictures of the test site. It's an amazing read, and I encourage everyone to head on over and give it a look.

*The Moscow Symphony Orchestra no less. Is that irony?