It's Wednesday, August 6, 2025. I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

There are certain dates that simply demand our attention. They raise to the front status, the absolute topline status, urgent moral questions,

and sometimes these questions endure generation to generation. Today marks the 80th anniversary

of the first nuclear detonation of an atomic weapon used in war. And of course, it was the

forces of the United States that dropped the bomb

on Hiroshima. And the world was changed. Warfare was changed. Military strategy was changed.

Frankly, the way people think about the world, think about war, think about safety, think about

even just survival. All of that changed. And it would change in a way

that would come up and wash on the shore in recurring waves over the course of the last

several decades, eight of them, to be precise. Most human beings alive on the morning of August

6, 1945, did not even know of the existence of atomic weapons.

Actually, very, very few human beings knew that such weapons existed.

But, of course, there is a very interesting historical background to this.

And a part of it goes back to the beginning of what we might call nuclear physics.

And in the very rudimentary steps, the human beings took towards understanding the power of

the atom in the early decades of the 20th century. Almost immediately, this tells us something about

human beings. Almost immediately, there were those who could jump from, say, the understanding of

atomic structure and the ability to divide the atom, and they would go then to the possibility of an

awesome, horrifying release of energy and what would be a nuclear bomb. And as you look at the

develop of atomic weaponry, it's really interesting to note that it was physicists, largely in

Germany, who were really pioneering in this area. And not by accident, by the way.

A lot of this came out of the German university system.

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