The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the world 's first nuclear explosion , near Alamogordo , New Mexico on July 16 , 1945 . Oppenheimer had given the site the codename " Trinity " in mid-1944 and said later that it was from one of John Donne 's Holy Sonnets . According to the historian Gregg Herken , this naming could have been an allusion to Jean Tatlock , who had committed suicide a few months previously and had in the 1930s introduced Oppenheimer to Donne 's work . Oppenheimer later recalled that , while witnessing the explosion , he thought of a verse from the '' Bhagavad Gita '' ( XI ,12 ) : '' divi sūrya-sahasrasya bhaved yugapad utthitā yadi bhāḥ sadṛṥī sā syād bhāsas tasya mahāḥmanaḥ '' Years later he would explain that another verse had also entered his head at that time : namely , the famous verse : " " ( XI ,32 ) , which he translated as " I am become Death , the destroyer of worlds . " In 1965 , he was persuaded to quote again for a television broadcast : Brigadier General Thomas Farrell , who was present in the control bunker at the site with Oppenheimer , summarized his reaction as follows : Physicist Isidor Rabi noticed Oppenheimer 's disconcerting triumphalism : " I 'll never forget his walk ; I 'll never forget the way he stepped out of the car ... his walk was like '' High Noon '' ... this kind of strut . He had done it . " At an assembly at Los Alamos on August 6 ( the evening of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima ) , Oppenheimer took to the stage and clasped his hands together " like a prize-winning boxer " while the crowd cheered . He noted his regret the weapon had not been available in time to use against Nazi Germany . However , he and many of the project staff were very upset about the bombing of Nagasaki , as they did not feel the second bomb was necessary from a military point of view . He traveled to Washington on August 17 to hand-deliver a letter to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson expressing his revulsion and his wish to see nuclear weapons banned . In October 1945 Oppenheimer was granted an interview with President Harry S. Truman . The meeting , however , went badly , after Oppenheimer remarked he felt he had " blood on my hands " . The remark infuriated Truman and put an end to the meeting . Truman later told his Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson " I do n't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again . " For his services as director of Los Alamos , Oppenheimer was awarded the Medal for Merit from President Harry S Truman in 1946
Trinity
Trinity (nuclear test)
J. Robert Oppenheimer