“We knew the world would not be the same,” Oppenheimer remembered in
1965. “A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were
silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad
Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his
duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'”
