What was going through Oppenheimers mind when he dropped the bomb

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer

He was the scientific director on the Manhattan bomb project. Someone
recently posted up what he said when they dropped the first bomb. The
Trinity nuclear test was the first time a nuclear bomb was released.
This was the technology which remade world peace, in a sense, which
still lasts today through the same sort of thing as Pax Romana (the
longest period of peace between superpower nations in the history of
humanity thus far).

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

This is a quote from the Hindu god Shiva (the god of death and
considered important in the triumvirate of gods in Hinduism.

That's it. He recognised the destructive potential of what he'd created.
As a lead scientist he could see the devastating power of an
uncontrolled nuclear blast.

I've also been watching a documenrary about brain science. One of the
most important people was a patient with epilepsy. A doctor guessed the
hippocampus was the area which was the problem so he removed it with a
silver straw. He literally sucked out the bit of this man's brain which
was associated with memory. It created a unique person with no ability
to form new memories. The documentary says thousands of papers have been
written on the studies done on this man. He may have found perfect
happiness by the destructiion of his ability to form new memories so
they turned his life into a lab experiment. Day after day psychologists
came to examine this man.

There are other cases. The scientists who work on weapons research. What
goes through these scientists minds?

I remember studying a lecture course which was on nuclear and other
missile science. I remember hearing how certain "mobile robots" can
follow parapoblic paths from one point on a sphere to another point on a
sphere. My fellow students silently noted this down and got on with
their work. I was somewhat aghast and also somewhat intrigued. A mobile
robot is an intercontinental ballistic missile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile

Thanks to MIRV technology one of these can decimate a small country.
Just one. We were being taught how their guidance system works. The
sphere was the Earth and the target the mobile robot had to reach was
where it would detonate.

A few of my course friends may have ended up in the industry. Lots of
electronic engineers end up in the weapons industry.

There's probably a good word for this. A big one. Perhaps there's even a
concept. Is this about human blindness to what is our individual work
does? Or is it about the forced blindness some people need to fulfill
certain roles in life, blindness which becomes conditioned. Oppenheimer
would have justified what he did as necessary to save lives. He was a
brilliant scientist. He could have never predicted the Cuban missile
crisis which almost started World War 3. By a hair's breath he's not
responsible for a cataclysm the human race may never recover from.

But what is that power in men and sometimes in women not to be able to
see how their work fits into the bigger picture. how we're all part of a
chain of events.