His faith will save Arjuna's soul.' But Oppenheimer, seemingly, was never able to achieve this peace. “And ultimately the most important thing is he should be devoted to Krishna. Krishna not Arjuna will determine who lives and who dies and Arjuna should neither mourn nor rejoice over what fate has in store, but should be sublimely unattached to such results,” says Thompson. 'Arjuna is a soldier, he has a duty to fight. Its meaning is simple: irrespective of what Arjuna does, everything is in the hands of the divine. 'The quotation 'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds', is literally the world-destroying time,” explains Thompson, adding that Oppenheimer’s Sanskrit teacher chose to translate “world-destroying time” as “death”, a common interpretation. In verse thirty-two, Krishna speaks the line brought to global attention by Oppenheimer. In Hinduism, which has a non-linear concept of time, the great god is not only involved in the creation, but also the dissolution. Oppenheimer’s interest in Hinduism was about more than a soundbite, it was a way of making sense of his actions. 'He was obviously very attracted to this philosophy,” says Rev Dr Stephen Thompson, who holds a PhD in Sanskrit grammar and is currently reading a DPhil at Oxford University on other aspects of the language and Hindu faith. While he never became a Hindu in the devotional sense, Oppenheimer found it a useful philosophy to structure his life around. “A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.” Oppenheimer, watching the fireball of the Trinity nuclear test, turned to Hinduism. “We knew the world would not be the same,” he later recalled. As wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the birthplace of the Manhattan Project, he is rightly seen as the “father” of the atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer died at the age of sixty-two in Princeton, New Jersey on February 18, 1967.

It is, perhaps, the most well-known line from the Bhagavad-Gita, but also the most misunderstood. A photograph on display at The Bradbury Science Museum shows the first thermonuclear test on OctoBradbury Science Museum / Getty ImagesĪs he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of Hindu scripture ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.

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