American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

In 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, NBC television aired a documentary, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, narrated by Chet Huntley, which featured Robert’s recollection of the July 16 Trinity test and his recitation from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” On another occasion, when an interviewer asked him on camera what he thought of Senator Robert Kennedy’s recent proposal that President Johnson initiate talks with the Soviet Union to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer puffed hard on his pipe and said, “It’s twenty years too late. . . . It should have been done the day after Trinity.”