With a single tremendous flash across the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer — director of the Manhattan Project to develop the world's first atomic bomb — became the most famous scientist of his generation.
The piercing light, dimming to reveal a terrible fireball growing in the sky above the July 1945 Los Alamos test site, heralded the dawn of the atomic age. A physicist, polymath and mystic, Oppenheimer recalled greeting the mushroom cloud with a line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita that he had taught himself Sanskrit to read: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
