5, 4, 3, 2, 1 In the dead silence of the morning, at 5 h 29 min 45 sec, the first atomic bomb exploded in a desert area of New Mexico known as La Jornada del Muerto. “We knew the world would never be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the lines from the Bhagavad Gita (Mahabharata) in which Vishnu says: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’” Oppenheimer (Director of the Manhattan (atomic research) project).