On this day in history, July 16th, 1945, the first successful test of the atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico. Those who have seen the film, “Oppenheimer” (2023) would remember the scene where scientists of the Manhattan Project would watch from a long-distance and wear protective glasses, the power of nuclear energy. 

Weeks later, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, forcing Japan’s surrender in the Second World War. Reaction to nuclear technology included fascination, horror and fear. Opportunities existed such as the capacity to produce energy on which a modern world relied, yet also had the potential to obliterate all men from the planet and destroy the planet. The chief scientist who led the Manhattan project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was chief among those calling for restraints and safety controls and opposition to the more-powerful hydrogen bomb. 

Christians joined many in both the emotion and ethical questions raised when the bombs were dropped. As “duck and cover” drills became common in schools and “fallout shelters” were built in homes, C.S. Lewis wrote an essay to his fellow followers of Christ called “On Living in an Atomic Age” in 1948. Today, we tend to forget that we still live in a nuclear age and his advice to the Christians is just as helpful today as it was then. 

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat at night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented… It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. . . 

Let the bomb find you doing well. [1] 

[1] Lewis, C.S. “On Living in a Nuclear Age.” In Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, 77-80. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.