atomic bomb

The atomic bomb changed everything. It just did. It's all but impossible to point to a suitable contemporary analogue to the events of August, 1945, when the United States military dropped two atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, killed tens of thousands of people, irradiated vast swaths of land, and reduced entire cities to rubble, all in about the time it takes to post a status update on Facebook.

Little else compares to that; an unprecedented scientific achievement harnessed to become what remains the most feared weapon in the world. And we all deal with the fact that those bombs went off (and that they might again, someday) in different ways. Some protest nuclear power. Some lobby for non-proliferation treaties. John Coster-Mullen reverse-engineered the bombs in his spare time and produced the most accurate replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy ever built.