Perhaps, at some not-too-distant point in time, we’ll grasp the horrible irony that Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal came just days before the 70th anniversary of the dawn of the atomic age. Exactly seven decades ago today, on July 16, 1945, a collection of the world’s greatest scientists, led by Robert Oppenheimer, successfully detonated a nuclear explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

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Oppenheimer would famously claim later that, as the unearthly fireball of a power never before known to man was ascending into the predawn sky, he quoted lines from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The following month, President Harry Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an act debated fiercely ever since. Yet after two uses of the bomb, through Cold War and hot wars alike, and as the power of thermonuclear weapons dwarfed the July 1945 Trinity explosion, neither America nor any other nuclear power dared unleash the ultimate weapon.

Now, 70 years after the greatest and most awful scientific achievement in history, we enter a new era. Successive American presidents unwilling to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to rogue regimes have negotiated their way to a nuclear North Korea, and have now given the green light to the theocratic mullahs of Iran to obtain the weapon that can bring their apocalyptic visions to reality. Those in the Middle East who rightly fear the Iranians will not sit idly by, but will pursue their own atomic weapons. Thanks to the weakness of American leaders, the world will soon be seared by uncertainty and insecurity of a type we have not known in decades. Look long on the fireball in the video above, for today none of us can be sure that it will not be a harbinger of our future.