Oppenheimer: Student of Sanskrit and Vedic Literature

Enthralled by the Bhagavad-Gita, the great Indian war epic written around the second century BCE, Oppenheimer began Sanskrit studies so he could read the text in its original language. While he was a professor, prior to WWII, he was known to quote passages from the Mahabharata in every class lecture.

While much is made of the Bhagavad-Gita as a mythic, spiritual saga, Oppenheimer, as a student and professor of theoretical physics and thermodynamics, was likely captivated by the explosive, burning weapons and devices described in detail — so precisely that modern researchers have been able to “reverse engineer” those technologies.

Were the Magical Weapons of the Mahabharata Nuclear Bombs?

One section of the Bhagavad-Gita, called the “Book of Drona,” describes ‘magical’ weapons, called “astra,” that could destroy entire armies, “causing crowds of warriors with steeds and elephants and weapons to be carried away as if they were dry leaves of trees.” Another weapon was described as producing vertical, billowing smoke clouds that opened consecutively like giant umbrellas, reminiscent of the massive rising mushroom clouds produced by the Trinity test.

Among the most destructive of the astra was the “brahmastra,” created by the god Brahma, a “single projectile charged with all the power in the universe. It was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes an entire race. There was neither a counter attack nor a defense that could stop it.”

The weapon produced “an incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000 suns that rose in all its splendor. After, corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out; pottery broke without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white… After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected.

“Any target hit by the brahmastra would be utterly destroyed; land would become barren and lifeless, rainfall would cease, and infertility in humans and animals would follow for aeons of time.”

The brahmastra was detonated at the end of the final 18-day battle of Kurukshetra. The Pandavas vanquished their enemy, the Kauravas, with the devastating weapon, but the few surviving Pandavas discovered that there was nothing left to occupy, and no one left to rule. The brahmastra had destroyed the entire Kauravas society and turned the region (present-day Rajasthan) to desert. The war also marked, in the Vedic system, the beginning of the current “Kaliyuga” age.

Trinity Test Eyewitness Accounts

Declassified eye-witness accounts of the Trinity nuclear test echo the ancient descriptions of the brahmastra. L.W. Alvarez was sitting between the pilot and co-pilot of a B-29 flying roughly 25 miles from the blast site. He said, “Intense light covered my field of vision, after which I noted an orange-red glow. The cloud started to push up, appearing as a parachute being blown up by a large electric fan.”

Ten miles from the blast, witness Enrico Fermi reported, “I had the impression that suddenly the countryside became brighter than full daylight.” Technician Kenneth Griesen, also ten miles from the site, saw “a brilliant yellow-white light all around. A tremendous cloud of smoke was pouring upwards, some parts having brilliant red and yellow colors, like clouds at sunset.”

Phillip Morrison reported that “what I saw first was a brilliant violet glow. Immediately after this brilliant violet flash, I observed an enormous, brilliant disk of white light, a color much whiter, and several times brighter than the noon sun.”

Trinity Test Fallout and Aftermath



While the U.S. Government publicly described the White Sands Proving Grounds region as uninhabited, there were actually around 40,000 people, including Mescalero Apache, living in the counties surrounding the test site. Many saw the explosion and displayed health impacts shortly after the blast — crops, and livestock were immediately contaminated.

A Popular Science article tells the story of Darryl Gilmore, from Tularosa, a small town on Highway 380 near the Trinity site. Gilmore was driving home from Albuquerque the morning of the test. He said he didn’t see the dawn flash before he left, but encountered military personnel on the highway who told him to roll up his windows, as there was poison gas in the area. Soon after, his arms, neck, and face turned sunburn red. “My outer skin gradually fell off the next few days. A few years later I began to have skin problems, and I’ve had treatments ever since,” he said. Gilmore has also survived prostate and other cancers.

New Mexico is known for a high number of cancer deaths — in fact, cancer is the state’s leading cause of death. An October 2017 study from the University of Arizona, “Measuring the Effect of Atmospheric Nuclear Testing on American Mortality Patterns,” stated that “the cumulative number of excess deaths attributable to these tests is comparable to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” citing 340,000 to 460,000 deaths that were directly or indirectly caused by tests.

Impacts: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

A more direct comparison to the brahmastra destruction is the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Trinity, the U.S. didn’t waste any time deploying the new atomic technology — less than three weeks later, on Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. Air Force dropped an atomic weapon, nicknamed “Little Boy,” on Hiroshima, Japan. Immediately, a reported 70,000 people were killed, with another 140,000 dying of radiation poisoning by 1946.

The core destruction radius was about a mile around ground zero. Fires were reported across an additional 4.4 sq. miles. Humans and animals in the blast zone turned to carbon, echoing the words of the Mahabharata; “corpses so burned as to be unrecognizable.” Others were killed by flying projectiles and fires. A few days later, the Nagasaki bombing produced the same death and devastation.