Robert Oppenheimer’s deep association with the Bhagwad Gita is compelling, and telling
Bhagwad Gita, in Christopher Nolan's just-released biopic, Oppenheimer. Physicist J Robert Oppenheimer has left his telling mark in the ushering of the nuclear age, and underlined the double-edged sword that science is in the hands of mankind, whether in the form of the A-bomb or AI.
He was the team leader of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s that led to the development of the first nuclear weapons, the use of which by the US against Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945, killed lakhs of civilians. Till now, the US has been the only country to use nuclear weapons against a country.
In Nolan's film, based on the Pulitzer-winning 2005 biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, the physicist is shown reciting lines from the Gita, a book he studied and translated from Sanskrit and held dear, first, in an intimate scene with his lover, and later, when the first atom bomb is tested successfully on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. In American Prometheus, the biographers describe Oppenheimer recalling in a 1965 NBC TV documentary, 'I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture… Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince [Arjun] that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form, and said, 'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.' Robert Jungk, in his 1958 book, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, had earlier recorded the 'full quote' in context: 'When the atomic fire lit at Alamogordo… filling the sky with an unearthly brightness, phrases from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagwad Gita, came almost visibly into his
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