I thought I'd post the passage I find most unforgettable from Grandpa's Song of the Promised Land...which I've been thinking about alot lately having enrolled in a law school seminar on Nuclear Non-Proliferation...(the spacing is altered due to constraints in the blog text)...

"The basic pitch in Mike’s wave is many seconds long. (So long a wave, so deep a tone Our ears were not designed to hear.) The shock wave will go round the earth a couple times, But unlike the musket shot at Concord, Many hardly seem to have been heard.

Now one feels the long positive pressure wave, seconds long, Not like the flick of a finger as on the ordinary A-bomb But like a great hand that holds down and presses

The negative pressure phase in its aftermath is even more drawn out. It pulls on our eardrums With a sensation that makes us wonder - Coming home at last to land as at an airport? Or falling into a bottomless pit? The whole atmosphere heaves with the shock wave. A million cubic miles of air shudders slowly in its saturnine wake, As if all of Nature is sighing at what has happened, A long drawn out sobbing,

Like Rachel, weeping for her children - And their Promised Land.

The main experiment having been successfully performed, Now I could worry about scientific housekeeping. I wondered ..... if all the cameras ran.

Still, I have never seen a day seem more like .... Sunday. There was an uncanny solemnity about preparations for that day: Unspoken but unmistakable, an almost liturgical ceremony Like some very special Easter Sunday sunrise service. It could well be, as it seemed that day. Redemption, Resurrection and the Transfiguration of Man Could be in that blinding pulse of light

one dared not look upon with naked eye."