'He was obviously very attracted to this philosophy,” says Rev Dr Stephen Thompson, who holds a PhD in Sanskrit grammar and is currently reading a DPhil at Oxford University on other aspects of the language and Hindu faith. While he never became a Hindu in the devotional sense, Oppenheimer found it a useful philosophy to structure his life around. “A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.” Oppenheimer, watching the fireball of the Trinity nuclear test, turned to Hinduism. “We knew the world would not be the same,” he later recalled. As wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the birthplace of the Manhattan Project, he is rightly seen as the “father” of the atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer died at the age of sixty-two in Princeton, New Jersey on February 18, 1967. It is, perhaps, the most well-known line from the Bhagavad-Gita, but also the most misunderstood. A photograph on display at The Bradbury Science Museum shows the first thermonuclear test on OctoBradbury Science Museum / Getty ImagesĪs he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of Hindu scripture ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
