The Bhagavad Gita, the Nuclear Bomb and the Tragedy of Being Oppenheimer - News18

On a cloudless morning in late 1943, a blue-eyed six-feet tall man with close-cropped hair wearing a big-brimmed brown porkpie hat stood somewhere in the middle of Los Alamos in New Mexico, United States, chain-smoking cigarettes and reciting passages from the Bhagavad Gita. It was Chapter 11, Verse 32 of the Bhagavad Gita, “Shrī-bhagavān uvācha, kālo ’smi loka-kṣhaya-kṛit pravṛiddho, lokān samāhartum iha pravṛittaḥ” In 1965 in an NBC television documentary, Oppenheimer the emotional and intellectual heart of the atom bomb project recollected: “We knew the world would not be the same. In a closed Senate hearing in 1946 Oppenheimer was asked, “whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an atomic bomb into New York and blow up the whole city,” to which he reacted sharply, “Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York.” The alarmed senator then asked, “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Oppenheimer joked, “A screwdriver — to open each and every crate or suitcase.” In the subsequent years, the hero of American science who had been hailed as a genius was shockingly alleged to be a communist based on rumours. Japan’s first Nobel prize-winning scientist Dr Hideki Yukawa agreed stating, “Dr Oppenheimer was also the symbol of the tragedy of the modern nuclear scientists” and felt that the government’s actions of stripping him of his security clearance might have shortened his life. Fifty-five years later on 16 December 2022 the US Department of Energy appropriately nullified a 1954 decision to revoke the security clearance, correct the historical record, and honour Dr Oppenheimer’s “profound contributions to our national defence and the scientific enterprise at large.” Now in 2023, over three-quarters of a century after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear weapon has been employed in the last seventy-eight years.