I was grateful to be able to attend the All Saints' Day liturgy at Christ Church Cathedral this evening. This service incorporated a lot of music, including many of the prayers; even the Gospel reading was (mostly) sung---the Beatitudes were sung as Hymn 560 from the Episcopal hymnal. The most beautiful part of the service for me was the offertory anthem, Song for Athene by John Tavener.
When I got home, I happened to turn on public television, and learned something rather unsettling: it was on All Saints' Day in 1952 that the first thermonuclear device was detonated. This was the device 'Mike' (part of the Ivy series of nuclear tests). Its yield was 10.4 megatons, much larger than anything that had been tested by either the Soviets or the US to that point (the largest yields before then were half a megaton). Mike was an unusual test in that it was more of a physics experiment than a bomb; it weighed more than 80 tons and involved cryogenics (its fuel was liquid hydrogen). The public television show, an episode of 'Secrets of the Dead,' sketched the story of that test, and the competing efforts by the US and the USSR to produce a thermonuclear weapon that could be delivered by air. It's still unclear which side won that race; they arrived at similar solutions at about the same time. The Americans built a bomb based on a solid fuel (lithium deuteride), as did the Soviets. The American test, in 1954, was code-named Castle Bravo; the Secrets of the Dead episode described the terrifying results of that test---because of an incomplete understanding of the physics of the lithium isotopes used in the bomb, its yield was not the expected 5 megatons but instead 15 megatons. The fallout from the test unexpectedly traveled eastward, contaminating a Japanese fishing boat and fatally poisoning some of its crew. But almost as disturbing was another, less-familiar story: the Soviet test of the 'Tsar Bomb,' a 50-megaton device designed by Andrei Sakharov. This was tested over a remote Arctic island, dropped by a bomber from an altitude of 40,000 ft (the bomb set to detonate at an altitude of 25,000 ft). The mushroom cloud reached an altitude of 40 miles. American scientists determined the result of such a weapon used over Washington, DC: all buildings destroyed to a radius of 20 miles, and 3.5 million deaths. When Sakharov realized how much damage was done in just testing this weapon, he became an opponent of nuclear weapons. His efforts in the Soviet Union to end the nuclear arms race led to the honor of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. In 1963, the Soviets and the Americans having signed a test-ban treaty prohibiting atmospheric tests.