The haunting words of the atomic bomb creator J. Robert Oppenheimer, upon witnessing the successful test of the world’s first nuclear weapon, are familiar to many, but do you know exactly what they mean and where they come from?
While looking upon the explosion, Oppenheimer thought of verses from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture and part of the epic poem Mahabharata, that go “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. (…) Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.”
As he recalled the moment in a 1965 interview:
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
The passage in question refers to Bhagavad Gita verse XI, 12 (divi sūryasahasrasya bhavedyugapadutthitā / yadi bhāḥ sadṛṥī sā syādbhāsastasya mahātmanaḥ), and the “Now I am become Death” is verse XI, 32 (kālo’smi lokakṣayakṛtpravṛddho lokānsamāhartumiha pravṛttaḥ).
As it happens, the interpretation is Oppenheimer’s own, although in the literature, the expression “shatterer” is more popular than “destroyer.” This is because the former appears in the first printed rendition of Oppenheimer’s anecdote from Time magazine in 1948.
Nonetheless, after the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, he traveled to Washington where he hand-delivered a letter to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in which he expressed his repugnance and desire to see nuclear weapons banned. He also got into an argument with President Harry S. Truman, to whom he told:
“Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.”
Atomic bomb creator’s love for Bhagavad Gita
A genius physicist with diverse interests that sometimes made him lose his focus on science, Oppenheimer learned languages, among others Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hinduism, and read (as well as analyzed) literary works such as the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit.
He even referred to Bhagavad Gita as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life, describing it to his brother as “very easy and quite marvelous,” as well as later calling it “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.”
Interestingly, Oppenheimer even quoted a passage from the epic at the memorial service of President Franklin Roosevelt in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he served as the director of the Manhattan Project’s Laboratory during World War II, tasked with developing the first nuclear weapons.
Nowadays, nuclear power serves better purposes, including as fuel for deep space missions or as a possible defense against a city-killer asteroid that has a (very) small chance of colliding with Earth in 2032, although it still has a role in the military, such as powering aircraft carriers.
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