JULY 16, 1945, marked the start of a new era in human history: the beginning of the nuclear age. On that date, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, a nuclear device was successfully tested by the US. Watching the test, Robert Oppenheimer (then director of the Los Alamos laboratory, where the bomb was created) — presumably in awe, and possibly in fear — quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Less than a month later, the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, causing unimagined devastation: truly, the destroyer of worlds.
This. . .
