The Shatterer of Worlds

At 5:30 A.M., Mountain War Time, on July 16, 1945 J. Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the creation of which he'd supervised for the previous three years. He was reminded of a line from the sacred Hindu epic, the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds." He was 41. Oppenheimer appears twice in A Book of Ages.