“Now I Am Become Death”: The Story Behind Oppenheimer’s Indelible Quote

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“Now I Am Become Death”: The Story Behind Oppenheimer’s Indelible Quote
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It’s unclear whether Oppenheimer actually said those words, though Kenneth Bainbridge—played in the film by Josh Peck—did reportedly respond to the outcome with a pithy quote of his own: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

In the film, the passage she picks just so happens to contain a quote Oppenheimer would make famous among English speakers: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”after the titular titan witnesses the awesome, terrible power of the atom bomb he’s shepherded into being. Again, Oppenheimer quotes this line from the Hindu scripture, the only words that seem able to capture what he and the other geniuses at the Manhattan Project have created.Nolan’s work is based in historical record.

20 years after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, Oppenheimer appeared in a 1965 NBC News documentary called“We knew the world would not be the same,” he said onscreen. “A few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, theVishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multiarmed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

When Oppenheimer first read the text, he couldn’t have known the eerie relevance it would have to his future. “About to lead his troops into mortal combat,” historiansand Martin J. Sherwin write by way of summary, “Arjuna refuses to engage in a war against friends and relatives. Lord Krishna replies, in essence, that Arjuna must fulfill his destiny as a warrior to fight and kill.”

Its eleventh verse is where Arjuna asks Krishna to show the prince his divine form. Krishna does, becoming something with “unlimited mouths and unlimited eyes…. If hundreds of thousands of suns rose up at once into the sky, they might resemble the effulgence of the Supreme Person in that universal form,” according to

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