Trinity: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. The Christian term for the threefold nature of God.

The word is also a name: the name of the site where the first atomic bomb experiments took place at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, U.S.A.

No one knows quite how this place got its name.

Perhaps it was named after a nearby mountain said to be so evil it was shunned by even the Native Americans. Or perhaps it simply refers to the threefold experiment about to take place—an experiment that began there with the detonation of the first atomic bomb, the Gadget, and that continued with Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima, and that concluded with Fat Man, which was dropped on Nagasaki.

Years later, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist who directed the Manhattan Project and oversaw nuclear weapons development in the U.S., tried to recall the reason for the name, but in the end, was unable to remember it clearly.

Still, though, he said, I’m sure I had that poem by John Donne somewhere in the back of my mind.

BATTER my heart, three-persone'd God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Erika Kobayashi

Erika Kobayashi (1978–) is a writer, comics artist and artist currently based in Tokyo. In 2008–2009 she was invited to New York as an Asian Cultural Council/ Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. Kobayashi has authored the novel “Madame Curie to choshoku wo” (Breakfast with Madame Curie, 2014), which was nominated for Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, the Mishima Yukio Award and the Akutagawa Award in 2014. Other works by Kobayashi include the manga/graphic novel “Hikari no kodomo 1,2 LUMINOUS”(Children of Light: Luminous, 2013/2016),which traces the history of the atom and of radiation ; and the autobiographical “Shin’ai naru Kitty tachi e”(Your Dear Kitty,, 2011), which is based on the diaries of Anne Frank and on the diary of Kobayashi’s real father. Recent selected exhibitions include "She Looks into the Mirror”(solo exhibition) at GALLERY360° in Tokyo, “Your Dear Kitty, the book of Memories”(collaborate with The Future) at Lloyd Hotel and JCC in Amsterdam, “The Radiants”(group exhibition) at Bortolami Gallery in New York, “Living Locally”(group exhibition) at Arts Maebashi in Gunma, “Roppongi Crossing 2016: My Body, Your Voice”(group exhibition) at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.