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Signature Quote

As long as I can remember being online my .sig has looked similar to this:

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“I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds”

People have told me that this is a miss quote of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It is said that – on the 16th of July 1945 while viewing the explosion of the first Atomic Bomb over the New Mexico’s Alamogordo Test Range – Oppenheimer said “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I’d been going though the world using the wrong quote, now I was quite attached to my version.

On /. a nice guy corrected me on the quote from the Bhagavad Gītā (भगवद् गीता ), but said that in principal it was not a real problem as this could be seen as the spirit of the word. (Lord Krishna is probably referring to Shiv when he says ‘destroyer of worlds’, because one of Shiv’s 5 jobs is ‘destroyer’.)

Then I find out that he didn’t actually say it at the time. He actually said: “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…” Also an apt quote from the Bhagavad Gita, but not the one I’d been using.

He doesn’t�use the quote until much later:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.¹

Now we’ve established my mistake, I can explain why it’s my .sig quote.

The Atomic Bomb fascinated me from a young age, being born before the fall of the Berlin Wall when Mutual Assured Destruction was a possibility made me interested in the first atomic bombs and the people who made them. The main question for me was, also posed in the BBC article “The End of the War Against Japan”², “Was it right for the Americans to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” And more specifically: “Is it right for any person to extinguish the flame of another?“

That’s a question each person should answer for themselves, this is the question my .sig poses.

The people who scrape up the courage to ask about my .sig mostly think it’s a little violent,�they’ve asked if I think I’m the destroyer. I’ve even been asked not to append it to the messages I send some people.�(I think 300.000 dead people is a little offensive.)�After about 10 years of having this .sig instinctively my reply is to tell them to go away, usually I ask them what about it offends them.

What’s really sad it that it has to do with the word destroyer. I’m trying to get a message across of being and they are offended that post-Gulf War I, post-Gulf War II, post-9/11 or post-anything bad happening in the world I use this quote to get my message across. (Just imagine what they would say if I replaced Shiva with Death.)

My point – I did have one – is that many nations remember their wars and their war dead. Let’s take some time to remember the people who’s life was taken so we might live in peace.

An atomic bomb codenamed Little Boy is dropped by the American B-29 Enola Gay on the city of Hiroshima in Japan at 8:16 a.m., killing 80,000 outright with another 60,000 dead by the end of the year due to fallout sickness. Ultimately, about 200,000 die due to the atomic bomb.³