1945, the Brave New World wakes up.

"They knew that the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remember the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says 'Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds'. I suppose we all felt that, one way or another."
Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb says these words and wipes a tear from his eye. The Alamogordo experiment marked the beginning of a new era for mankind. The US now had the potential to end millions of lives in one single instant, and so they did.
No, to say that the Brave New World began on the day the US tested the first ever nuclear weapon would be a lie. The Nagasaki and Hiroshima tragedy marked the day when the world suddenly woke up to a bloody start. The definition of political power shifted. No longer could you win a war through intelligence and tactics; instead it was simply a matter of who had the biggest gun.
They call the type of Atom Bomb dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima 'The Fat Man', a name oh so appropriate for such a device. In society, it's the fat man sitting behind his desk who has the potential to decide whether a nation rises or a nation falls. And oh, how Japan fell that day. 110 000 people suddenly ceased to exist in the space of a few seconds. Following that hundreds and thousands of Japanese citizens died from the after effects by the end of 1945.
But the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were more than just acts of war; they were experiments. After the Trinity test in Alamogordo, the military fat cats were interested in seeing what the nuke would do to people. What better way to satisfy their morbid curiosity than to use such a device on their enemies? It worked astoundingly efficiently. No one was really expecting Japan to surrender though. You could say that the Fat Man surpassed all of their expectations. But what kind of world is this when innocent people are used as lab-rats in this morbid experiment? What kind of world is this when we treat our fellow man like a confused animal?
Had the atom bomb never been created, the second world war may have stretched on for decades. In retrospect, the death of thousands helped prevent the death of millions. I think this is what Oppenheimer had in mind when he helped create it. Perhaps he assumed that the US would only use the bomb as a threat? Only he knows.

One thing is for certain though, what little sanity the world had left shattered. A new era of violence came in. One that was only hinted at with the arrival of Industrialisation. While the First World War showed us all what man was capable of doing, 1945 showed us all that man was more than willing to do it. We began to fear what we didn't understand, and later that fear became hate. We fought fire with fire, violence with violence. The latest example is of course the response to 9/11. Thousands of people died during the attack on the WTC, and we felt the need to 'return the favor', this time killing thousands of Iraqi citizens with our bombs. An eye for the eye makes the world blind. Blind to the political machinations that rustle and murmur behind the scenes. Blind to the corruption and the willingness to screw and snort and kill your way to the top. Blind to human nature itself.
This is what separates us from the rest of the animals (for we, too are beasts), we're different from the rest because what we do has nothing to do with instinct. What we do is down to malicious intent, the need to be the best, to have the last laugh. And it is this way of thinking that will end up killing every man, woman and child on this planet. Well, every man, woman and child except those responsible for the whole mess in the first place; the fat cats, the greedy politicians. Can we really call them human? Of course we can. They are the embodiment of human nature.

Peace