A team of physicists had just exposed its ultimate vulnerability and he famously noted, as he witnessed the mushroom cloud, that words of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad-Gita entered his mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Indeed, he saw immediately, as the newly developed bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, that Planet Earth was in danger. Oppenheimer challenged this official policy and shattered his career. Official government policy amounted to this: So what? War, the building block of the world’s governmental entities for uncounted millennia, had evolved to the brink of human extinction. The American government, in its infinite wisdom, knew it had no choice but to continue its nuclear weapons program and, for the sake of peace, put the world on the brink of Armageddon. What happened next, however, was the Cold War, and suddenly commies – our former allies – were the personification of evil, and they were everywhere. He led the Manhattan Project during World War II, which birthed Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing several hundred thousand people and ending the war. Oppenheimer, of course, is the father of the atomic bomb. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy. A mere 55 years after his death, the U.S.
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