How China’s ‘father of 2 bombs’ only emerged from the shadows just before his death
- ‘Sincere and modest’ Deng Jiaxian, who developed country’s first atomic bomb, was said to be diametrically opposed in character to Oppenheimer

His wife Xu Luxi later recalled that six years earlier, when he was first appointed to the job he could not tell his closest family what he would be doing or his whereabouts in the coming years.
He was not even allowed to visit his seriously ill mother while working on the project and only just made it to her deathbed after the test was successfully completed in October 1964.

Tuesday marks the centenary of the birth of Deng, the physicist who played a key role in developing China’s atomic and hydrogen bombs and who has now become a totemic figure in the story of China’s military development known as the “father of two bombs”.
Even his response to the test was more prosaic than Oppenheimer’s. While the American physicist quoted the Bhagavad Gita line “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” after testing the first atomic bomb, according to his family Deng only said: “It’s worth dying for.”