Ground Zero

I came across this word for the first time in early/late seventies when I had to study Nuclear Warfare either for studying for my promotion examination or subsequently preparing for my Defense Services Staff College Entrance Examination. The term ‘Ground Zero’ was defined as a point on the surface (ground or at sea) at which a surface burst or a point on the surface above or below which, a sub-surface or a low / high airburst of a nuclear device occurs. This concept of Ground Zero is important in Nuclear Warfare since its distance from the point of burst of a nuclear weapon along with the type of burst, determine the pattern of distribution of its total destructive power into various components ( flash, blast, thermal and nuclear radiation).

I remember that I was quite impressed by this word also because it seemed to combine all three dimensions of the Space but with a little difference (combining Length and Breadth into a single dimension, adding sub-surface Depth or Negative Height as the second dimension with Height above the surface providing the third dimension). I had not come across any other word, which had better illustrated any other concept of Old or Newtonian Physics. Later, when I read or rather tried reading Einstein and somewhat understood how he had introduced the fourth dimension of Time to Newtonian model and unlike Newton, who believed that Time and Space were different, even combined these two and called it as a Time-Space Continuum, that I realized that it was this concept of Ground Zero that had considerably aided my comprehension of the Continuum. Later but much later I felt that I had come around to get a faint understanding of the difficult concept of a singularity of a Black Hole where all laws of Physics are believed to break down completely, and where even Space and Time disappear. So for me, it all had started with Ground Zero.

After 9/11, I noticed that the Fourth Estate has been frequently using this term to denote the point on the ground, above which then stood the mighty twin towers of the World Trade Center, before they were humbled down by the terrorists' hara-kiri style air-strike. Please note that this word has been used here only in a single dimension.

India has been recently simmering with protest against the Government policy of having a caste-based quota- reservation system for higher professional education. The medical fraternity in the country in general, and the doctors of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in our country’s capital in particular, have been in the forefront of this protest campaign. Today, I found the Press making a more imaginative use of this word by describing AIIMS as the Ground Zero of this nation-wide protest. Perhaps, the use of the word ‘Epicenter’ may have sufficed but the Press would like us to believe that this discontent had been lying dormant for all these days and has surfaced only now. This time the word has been used probably in two dimensions but is yet short of its three-dimension use by the Armed Forces. We all know that the concept of Management also originated with the Armed Forces.

And I recently came across that ‘military intelligence’ is an example of an Oxymoron. Oh my God!