The day before, 16 July 1945, as he watched the mushroom cloud of Operation Trinity, the exhilarated director of the secret Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, quoted the Bhagavad Gita: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.’ But the ‘splendor’ had a fearsome power: ‘I am become Death, destroyer
