![]() Army on July 16, 1945, as a result of the Manhattan Project. The first detonation of a nuclear device, conducted by the U.S. According to Oppenheimer’s brother Frank, however, a physicist who was with him at the time, what they both said aloud was simply, “It worked.” Later in life, Oppenheimer famously said that he had recalled words from the Bhagavad-Gita, a classical Hindu text, as he witnessed the sight and sound of the mushroom cloud: “ I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” – lines that originally described the Lord Krishna revealing his full power. “ Batter my heart, three person’d God,” Donne pleads in “Holy Sonnet XIV,” asking God: “make me new.” Oppenheimer christened that test “Trinity,” referring to a sonnet by the English Renaissance writer John Donne, whose verses are famous for merging the sacred and the profane. The atomic bomb was first tested in the early morning of July 16, 1945, in the arid basin of southern New Mexico. As physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi later said, the bomb “treated humans as matter,” nothing more.īut Oppenheimer pointedly used religious language when talking about the project, as if to underscore the weight of its significance. ![]() Where people had once pictured doomsday as an act of God’s wrath or final judgment, now a world could could be gone in an instant, with no sacred significance, no story of salvation. The atomic bomb changed the meaning of the apocalypse. Corbis Historical via Getty Images ‘Batter my heart’ Leslie Groves, center, examine twisted wreckage, all that remains of a 100-foot tower after the ‘Trinity’ test. “ The physicists have known sin,” he remarked two years after the attacks, “and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” But he conveyed a sense of anguish – scripting his own tragic role, as I argue in my book about him. government’s justification of the atomic bombings: that they saved lives by preventing the need for invasion. Intense interest in Oppenheimer’s life and his ambivalent feelings about the bomb have turned him into almost a myth: a “tortured genius” or “tragic intellect” people try to comprehend because the terror of the bomb itself is too disturbing.įor the rest of his life, Oppenheimer gave the U.S. In American culture, however, fascination with the man behind the bomb often seems to eclipse the horrific reality of nuclear weapons themselves – as if he were the welder’s glass allowing viewers to safely look at the explosion, even as it obscures the blinding light. It’s little wonder that Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Oppenheimer,” tells the story of Los Alamos through this single life – or that Oppenheimer is the focus of so much writing about the bomb Oppenheimer’s life provides a human-scaled way to talk about an otherwise overwhelming topic. ![]() Under his directorship, scientists at Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bomb was designed and built, forever changed how people view the world, adding a new sense of precariousness. Oppenheimer had many achievements in theoretical physics but is remembered as the so-called father of the atomic bomb. Robert Oppenheimer’s triumph was his tragedy.
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