Two decades after helping to design the first atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, was asked to describe how he felt after the bomb's first test. "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky," he quoted from the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita, "that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."
When bombs that he helped design were unleashed over two cities in Japan in August 1945, they detonated at temperatures 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun. So began the Atomic Age, a period that would blow apart our ideas about warfare and technology, send the Americans and Russians into a perpetual state of fear, and set the world on a course of nuclear power, the unintended effects of which are being felt once again in Japan.
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