"I Am Become Death."

"I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds," a line from the Bhagavad Gita, was J. Robert Oppenheimer's only thought after the blinding flash of the first atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945. The August bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a less literary relation to death: hundreds of thousands died in the blasts or from the radiation sickness that followed. Such devastation and the technology that made it possible naturally evoked much commentary from theologians and the clergy. Despite the fact that the public overwhelmingly approved of the atomic bomb, America's religious leaders responded to the bomb less unanimously. Their doubts and misgivings about living in an atomic world soon became part of American popular culture.

Protests.

Most Americans agreed with theologian Reinhold Niebuhr that the bombings...