Seven years after the nuclear tests in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, was lecturing at a college when a student asked if it was the first atomic test conducted. “Yes, in modern times,” he replied. The sentence, enigmatic and incomprehensible at the time, was actually an allusion to ancient Hindu texts that describe an apocalyptic catastrophe that doesn’t correlate with volcanic eruptions or other known phenomena. Oppenheimer, who avidly studied ancient Sanskrit, was undoubtedly referring to a passage in “The Bhagavad Gita” that describes a global disaster caused by “an unknown weapon, a ray of iron.”
