“At that moment..... there flashed into my mind a passage from theBhagavad-Gita, the sacred book of the Hindus: ‘I am become death the shatterer ofWorlds.’”J. Robert Oppenheimer.*****July 16, 1945: J. Robert Oppenheimer and a group of American scientistswitnessed the startling fruits of their labor, in the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico,the first explosion of a nuclear weapon. Prior to this moment all known explosivesderived their potency from the rapid burning or decomposition of a chemical compound,receiving only the energy from each atom’s outer most electron. No longer would thehuman race rely on such insufficient usage of atomic energy. Oppenheimer, along withsuch other great minds as Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey, discovered a way to takeadvantage of the energy supplied not from the tearing away of one electron, but of thetearing apart of a an atomic nucleus. Even so, the atomic bomb only opened the door tomore efficiently utilize the energy in matter, as one scientist hypothesized that the firstatom bombs only utilized 1/100 of one percent of the pure energy available in matter....
