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Lot Essay
'If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst into the sky,
that would be like
the splendor of the Mighty One'
(Bhagavad-Gita)
One of the most-cited quotations from the history of the atomic age is what J. Robert Oppenheimer claimed to have thought when he witnessed the world's first nuclear explosion: "Brighter than a thousand suns." Shortly after Oppenheimer, director of the laboratory that developed the atomic bomb saw the fireball glowing over the New Mexico desert at the Trinity test site on 16 July 1945, those words derived from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita, came to his mind. The quotation that vividly was meant to describe the magnificence of God conveyed the breathtaking destructiveness of the first icon of the nuclear age- the fearsome mushroom cloud. This blast of energy of unprecedented vicious magnitude ushered our world into a new era, the era of mass destruction weapons.
After six decades J. Robert Oppenheimer or "the father of the atomic bomb" left us with a heavy legacy of more than 32000 nuclear bombs, he left us also with a handful of states which insist that those weapons provide unique security benefits, and yet reserve uniquely to themselves the right to own them, and of course states craving to possess the weapon.
In the years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer looked back on it as something bound to happen, repeatedly saying that it was inevitable. Fear became inevitable too; it became gradually human's first nature. Making wars is a human nature as well. Now, if not always at the forefront of our everyday thinking, the shadow of the apocalyptic mushroom cloud remains on all our minds.
What had the "brightness of more than a thousand suns" has pushed our world further into a darker place, or even a place that lacks light and hope. Ironically, Oppenheimer, himself declared later that the bomb "mercilessly" dramatized "the inhumanity and evil of modern war".
were to burst into the sky,
that would be like
the splendor of the Mighty One'
(Bhagavad-Gita)
One of the most-cited quotations from the history of the atomic age is what J. Robert Oppenheimer claimed to have thought when he witnessed the world's first nuclear explosion: "Brighter than a thousand suns." Shortly after Oppenheimer, director of the laboratory that developed the atomic bomb saw the fireball glowing over the New Mexico desert at the Trinity test site on 16 July 1945, those words derived from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita, came to his mind. The quotation that vividly was meant to describe the magnificence of God conveyed the breathtaking destructiveness of the first icon of the nuclear age- the fearsome mushroom cloud. This blast of energy of unprecedented vicious magnitude ushered our world into a new era, the era of mass destruction weapons.
After six decades J. Robert Oppenheimer or "the father of the atomic bomb" left us with a heavy legacy of more than 32000 nuclear bombs, he left us also with a handful of states which insist that those weapons provide unique security benefits, and yet reserve uniquely to themselves the right to own them, and of course states craving to possess the weapon.
In the years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer looked back on it as something bound to happen, repeatedly saying that it was inevitable. Fear became inevitable too; it became gradually human's first nature. Making wars is a human nature as well. Now, if not always at the forefront of our everyday thinking, the shadow of the apocalyptic mushroom cloud remains on all our minds.
What had the "brightness of more than a thousand suns" has pushed our world further into a darker place, or even a place that lacks light and hope. Ironically, Oppenheimer, himself declared later that the bomb "mercilessly" dramatized "the inhumanity and evil of modern war".