J Robert Oppenheimer and India

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The man

American theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, best known for his contribution towards creating the atomic bomb.

As Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, Oppenheimer led the so-called ‘Manhattan Project’ — and the team of scientists who worked to harness 20th century advances in nuclear physics for the purposes of war.

However, after witnessing firsthand the devastating potential of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer became one of the strongest voices against their proliferation, and of the growing nuclear arms race between the United States and the (erstwhile) Soviet Union.

Oppenheimer and the Bhagavad Gita

Despite the job that he did, Robert Oppenheimer always had doubts about “bestowing humanity the possible means for its own annihilation”. After witnessing the Trinity Test, his reservations were amplified manifold. And like so many others, he sought the meaning of his actions in the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita.

In 1965, speaking on the first-ever detonation of an atomic bomb, he quoted the Gita. “Vishnu (Krishna) is trying to persuade the Prince (Arjuna) that he should do his duty, and to impress him [He] takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’,” Oppenheimer said.

Today, Oppenheimer’s “I am become Death” quote has become inextricably tied to the nuclear age, an apt description of the terrifying and awesome destructive potential of nuclear weapons. It also provides insight into how Oppenheimer himself understood the atomic bomb and his role in creating it.

In his paper ‘The Gita of J Robert Oppenheimer’ (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 2000), the American historian James A Hijiya wrote that Oppenheimer used the Bhagavad Gita “as an anodyne for the pangs of conscience”.

“For an uncertain soldier like Oppenheimer, nervously fashioning his own atomic ‘arrow’, Arjuna sets a good example,” Hijiya wrote. “If it was proper for Arjuna to kill his own friends and relatives in a squabble over the inheritance of a kingdom, then how could it be wrong for Oppenheimer to build a weapon to kill Germans and Japanese whose governments were trying to conquer the world?” he wrote.