Eighty years ago today, in the early morning at a place called Trinity in the desert outside Alamagordo in the New Mexico desert, a new star arose from the landscape. It was not a natural phenomenon. This unprecedented display of light and heat, brighter than two suns as one observer said, was a thing engineered by the minds of men. It was seen for hundreds of miles in every direction. "I am become death, destroyer of worlds," project lead Robert Oppenheimer uttered when he beheld the culmination of years of research. Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge perhaps summed it up better: "Now...