This quote has risen in the public consciousness since the premier of _Oppenheimer_, the film. The father of the atomic bomb recalled this phrase turning in his mind as he witnessed the first nuclear bomb explode at the Trinity test site on July 16, 1945. It turns out, Robert Oppenheimer was extremely well versed in global literature, and found much compelling about Hinduism and the Christian poems of John Donne, and these interests have in turn left their mark on contemporary culture.
Oppenheimer took up studying ancient Sanskrit in the early 1930s during his time teaching at UC Berkeley. The famous Bhagavad Gita was a text he much admired, giving copies away to friends and family and writing that he thought it was “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.” The quote of course was Oppenheimer’s reflection on his own culpability in bringing the nuclear bomb to fruition, but in the Bhagavad Gita, the line comes at a moment when the God Krishna reveals his entire identity to his loyal servant, the warrior Arjuna. Krishna’s divine nature takes the form of all creation, which includes cycles of birth and death. An earlier statement in the Gita also applies to the Trinity test: “if the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one”.
The 17th-century Christian poet John Donne inspired the test-site name “Trinity.” Oppenheimer said he got the idea for the name from Donne’s poem “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” which is about redemption.
The common thread between the “Trinity” and Bhagavad Gita references is that they both get at the idea of someone who ultimately gets divine sanction, despite the fact that their actions also cause suffering. Oppenheimer probably thought of his role in the Manhattan Project in this light.
