GROUND ZERO
[Q] From Ryan Bass: “What do you know about the origin of the term ground zero?”
[A] It was used first about the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II; at least, its first appearance — in the New York Times on 7 July 1946, about a year after the events — is in this connection: “The intense heat of the blast started fires as far as 3,500 feet from ‘ground zero’ (the point on the ground directly under the bomb’s explosion in the air)”. The term looks as though it has been borrowed from a bit of existing military jargon, though I can’t find an earlier example.
More recently, the term has taken on various other associations: it became a jargon term for the point of origin of any momentous or damaging event, such as the point on the ground above the epicentre of an earthquake, or the place at which a tornado touches down. It has also been used in a figurative sense for the focal point of some event or endeavour — as, for example, in Newsweek in September 1993: “Avedon has had a knack for locating himself at ground zero of American culture”.
The devastating effects of the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 reminded people of the aftermath of a nuclear attack. The term was instantly applied to the site, to the extent that it looked for a while as though it would displace the older meanings entirely.
The site of an air crash in New York in early November 2001 was also described in some newspapers immediately after the event as ground zero, suggesting that the term was already moving back its earlier sense of the centre or focus of some massive destruction.
