Monday marked an anniversary of a different kind. Sixty-two years ago, we began what was known as Jornada del Muerto, the journey of death. I say we began it, because we did; except now the whole world joins us on this journey.

During World War II, a group of scientists, most of them having fled fascist regimes in Europe, met with President Roosevelt and told him that Hitler had commissioned some scientists of his own to work on an atomic bomb.

They warned that the results would be cataclysmic if the “wrong side” developed such a weapon. Roosevelt agreed and approved the Manhattan Project.

With remarkable speed, the scientists refined the materials needed and created the first manmade fission chain reaction. By May 1945, the nuclear material necessary to fuel such a bomb was enriched and the military and scientific communities agreed that they should give it a dry run before attempting to use it as a weapon.

Two months later, on July 16, 1945, the first nuclear test – code-named Trinity – took place atop a 60-foot tower in the desert of New Mexico.

Of course, the resulting multi-megaton explosion didn’t just vaporize the tower; it turned the desert sand to glass. You can go see it if you want. Two days a year, outsiders are allowed to tour the location where the journey of death began. Caution is recommended. Radiation levels are still at ten times the recommended level of exposure.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist in charge of the Trinity test, after seeing the enormity of the blast created by their new war technology, quoted the Hindu epic the Bhagavad-Gita and said, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The test director, Kenneth Bainbridge, responded, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

Several weeks later, on Aug. 6 and again on Aug. 9, they were both right, as a world weary of war witnessed the detonation of this ghastly weapon on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The objective was to kill so many people in one place that the killing everywhere else would stop.

It worked – for a little while.

And while technically the atom bomb never killed again, it also seems that it has never stopped killing – and not just because Oppenheimer and most of the other witnesses to or survivors of the atomic explosions died of cancer.

We’ve advanced beyond the need to use the bomb; now the fear of nuclear weapons kills. The mere rumor of their existence is a reason for war. When President Bush told us that Saddam Hussein had a mechanism to get yellow cake enriched uranium from Niger, our nation got scared and then people began to die.

No such material existed, and it didn’t have to; panic caused by nuclear phantoms created additional victims of the atom bomb and they’re still dying.

Saturday, almost exactly 62 years after the Trinity test, we faced another nuclear test. Hopefully, we’ll pass this one.

Very early Saturday morning, an oil-filled tanker sailed to North Korea bringing desperately needed fuel to a country where doctors say they have only enough electricity to do their work 15 percent of the time.

Several hours later, 10 U.N. nuclear weapons inspectors began their journey from the capital Pyongyang to supervise the shutdown of the Yongbyon reactor 60 miles away.

A pretty good exchange that’s long overdue.

North Korea’s secrecy guards many facts. But the international media and world aid organizations’ best guesses estimate that 25 percent of North Koreans are starving while 33 percent of their children are. This doesn’t mean that North Koreans brutally starve their kids; it’s more a game of numbers. The country has a negative population growth directive similar to China’s; consequently they have proportionately fewer children, causing the higher statistic among the young.

So the North Korean government leveraged the world community to trade with them. Threatening nuclear weapons in exchange for food and fuel, they have amassed both the vulnerability and the power of marching alongside us on the Jornada del Muerto.

Pat LaMarche of Yarmouth is the author of “Left Out In America: The State of Homelessness in the United States.” She can be contacted at PatLaMarche@hotmail.com.