On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 am, the world changed.
That was the moment when the Manhattan Project exploded the first atom bomb. The test took place in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Scientists and a few dignitaries removed themselves ten thousand yards away to observe as the first mushroom cloud stretched forty thousand feet into the air. The bomb generated the destructive power of fifteen to twenty thousand tons of TNT. The tower on which it sat when it was detonated was vaporized.
The original $6,000 budget for the Manhattan Project grew to a total cost of $2 billion.
The brilliance of Robert Oppenheimer
In his book, Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World, Chris Wallace describes the project’s director, Robert Oppenheimer: “He was fluent in six languages and well versed in classical literature and Eastern philosophy. He learned Sanskrit just so he could read the ‘Bhagavad Gita,’ a Hindu devotional poem, in its original language.”
Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in three years. At the age of twenty-two, he was awarded a PhD in physics from the University of Gottingen in Germany. He led a team comprised of some of the greatest physicists in the world, including six Nobel Prize winners.
As he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, a sentence from the Bhagavad Gita ran through Oppenheimer’s mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” According to Wallace, Oppenheimer was proud of their achievement, believing that the bomb would shorten the war.
A Hindu scholar explains that the phrase meant to Oppenheimer, “In the larger scheme of things, presumably…
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