Dr.. Robert Oppenheimer is regarded as the father of the atom bomb. He was the head of the Manhattan Project,which was the secret name of the highest priority U.S.government war time project for making the bomb..
Apart from being a great scientist, Dr. Oppenheimer was also a great scholar of Sanskrit, who had studied many Sanskrit works in original. When the first atomic bomb exploded on 16th July, 1945 in the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico, a passage from the Bhagavad Gita flashed in his mind :
" If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst into the sky
that would be like
the splendour of the Mighty One "
But when the sinister and gigantic mushroom cloud rose up in the far distance over Point Zero, he uttered another line from the Gita :
" Now I am become Death, the destroyer of the worlds " ( Gita, Chapter 11 )
( see the book ' Brighter Than a Thousand Suns ;, by Robert Jungk )
