Did You Know, Nehru Offered Indian Citizenship To Oppenheimer, Father Of Atomic Bomb?

India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had offered Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, the country's citizenship in 1954.

It was because about nine years after becoming America's celebrated scientist, he was humiliated over statements against nuclear weapons, the co-author of the book that inspired Christopher Nolan's movie on the American quantum physicist, told Hindustan Times.

Kai Bird co-authored the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer.

"After he [Oppenheimer] was humiliated in 1954...Nehru offered him to come to India and become a citizen...But I do not think Oppenheimer considered it [the offer] seriously because he was a deeply patriotic American," the daily quoted him as saying in an interview.

Oppenheimer faced a harrowing ordeal in what was described as a "terrible kangaroo court," leading to the revocation of his security clearance during a virtual security hearing, he said. This unfortunate series of events marked him as the primary target of the McCarthy witch-hunts, a term coined to illustrate the tactics employed by Republican senator Joseph R McCarthy to publicly accuse government employees of disloyalty and employ questionable methods to prosecute them during the government's efforts to combat communism in the US.

According to the author, Oppenheimer feared the rise of Fascism. Bird said, "He was of Jewish ancestry, but not a practising Jew. He gave money to help rescue Jewish refugees from Germany. He feared that German physicists were going to give Hitler an atomic bomb, that Hitler would be able to win the [Second World] war, and this would be a terrible outcome, a victory for fascism around the world. So he felt this [the atomic bomb] was necessary."

Oppenheimer had mixed emotions regarding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The writer said, "By the spring of 1945, Germany was defeated. And that spring, some of the physicists and scientists...held an impromptu meeting to discuss the future of the gadget, and to ask why are we working so hard to build this terrible weapon of mass destruction when we know the Germans are defeated and Hitler is dead, and the Japanese can't possibly have a bomb project?"

Talking about Bird's love for Hindu's holy book Bhagavad Gita, Bird said, "And he got Arthur Ryder, the only Sanskrit scholar at Berkeley University, to tutor him in Sanskrit so that he could read the Gita in the original."

His fascination for Gita stemmed from his captivation with mysticism and certain philosophical concepts within it that bore resemblance to quantum ideas concerning the nature of the universe. He added, "And that famous line that he used to describe what he thought when he saw the Trinity explosion [first detonation of a nuclear weapon]- 'I am death, destroyer of the world' - some Sanskrit scholars, as I understand it, think that the more accurate translation would be 'I am Time, destroyer of worlds'. He is a quantum physicist, so he is trying to understand time and space, and these are issues that the Gita sort of addresses on some level."

Oppenheimer Controversy
Meanwhile, 'Oppenheimer', a biographical drama on the titular American theoretical physicist, opened in India on Friday to positive reviews, but has landed in a controversy.

A scene in the film, in which the titular character appears to have sex as he reads out verses from an ancient Sanskrit scripture, has irked a section of social media users, who claimed the lines are from the Bhagavad Gita and demanded the removal of the sequence from Christopher Nolan's latest film.

On the other hand, Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur has sought an explanation from the Central Board of Film Certification and asked it to take corrective action.