J. Robert Oppenheimer

J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) directed the Los Alamos laboratory that designed the first nuclear weapons, and spent the rest of his life arguing for international control of them — a campaign that ended with his security clearance revoked in 1954. The Sanskrit was not an affectation: he learned the language at Berkeley under the Indologist Arthur Ryder in the 1930s, read the Bhagavad Gita in the original, kept a copy on his desk and gave copies to friends. When he reached for it in 1965, he was reaching for something he had actually read.