Oppenheimer
After the Trinity Test in 1945, the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is the subject of a new film by Christopher Nolan, famously quoted Lord Vishnu from the Bhagavad Gita (in his head). The experiment produced the first atomic bombs in history and left Oppenheimer with a lifetime of regret.
Oppenheimer
According to Oppenheimer’s biographers, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were cause for celebration. The room was packed with “whistling, cheering, foot-stomping scientists and technicians, and he was sorry only that the bomb had not been ready in time for use in Germany,” according to a 1995 article in The Atlantic. He even provided military guidance on how to position the weapons properly. “Don’t let them bomb through a cloud cover or a cloudy day. I took a look at the objective.
It must be dropped visually; no radar bombing is permitted. Naturally, they cannot drop it in the rain or in the fog. Let them not blow it up too high. The fixed figure is accurate. Keep it from rising so that the target takes less damage, he said.
Oppenheimer reportedly told President Harry S. Truman that he had blood on his hands when he visited him in October. The blood was on my hands; let me worry about that, Truman retorted.
Paul Ham’s book Hiroshima Nagasaki
According to Paul Ham’s book Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath, President Truman expelled Oppenheimer from the Oval Office because he was “disgusted by this cry-baby attitude,” while The Atlantic claimed the same thing.
President Truman reportedly even urged his subordinates, “Don’t let that crybaby in here again,” in an essay by Steven Shapin that appeared in the London Review of Books in 2000. Many of his biographers linked that interaction, lacking Truman’s contempt, to the one between Krishna and Arjuna in the Gita.
According to James A. Hijiya’s essay, The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Krishna gives Arjuna three justifications for not abdicating his responsibility. He explains to Arjuna that fighting is part of his duty as a soldier, that Krishna—not Arjuna—will decide who survives and who dies, that Arjuna must dissociate himself from the consequences of his deeds, and that his sole responsibility is to be true to Krishna. “Death am I, and my present task is Destruction,” Krishna declares as Arjuna “begins to see the light.”
Oppenheimer seems to have accepted his part in the entire operation and was aware of the seriousness of what he had done. “If you are a scientist,” he said to his coworkers at Los Alamos in November 1945, “You cannot stop such a thing… If you’re a scientist, you probably think it’s beneficial to give humanity as a whole the most authority possible to rule the planet and govern it in accordance with its ideals.
Oppenheimer committed his life to nuclear power regulation after Truman ordered him to stop. The actor Cillian Murphy portrays him in the movie, which opens in theatres on Friday. Truman is portrayed by Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman, with whom Nolan worked on the Dark Knight trilogy.
