The Einstein-Szilard Letter
Albert Einstein signed a letter to Franklin Roosevelt on 2 August 1939 warning that uranium could be made into an extremely powerful bomb and that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from occupied Czechoslovakia. Leo Szilard wrote it. He had conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933 and understood immediately what the discovery of fission by Hahn and Strassmann in December 1938 meant, and he could not get anyone in Washington to listen. His solution was to use the only physicist whose name a president would recognise. He and Eugene Wigner drove out to Peconic on Long Island, where Einstein was on holiday, and explained the situation; Einstein said he had not thought of it, and agreed to sign. Edward Teller drove Szilard on the second visit to settle the text. The letter was carried to Roosevelt in October by the economist Alexander Sachs, who got the point across by telling him a story about Napoleon rejecting Fulton's steamship. Roosevelt said that what Sachs was after was making sure the Nazis did not blow them up, and called in his aide. The Advisory Committee on Uranium that followed was given six thousand dollars. Nothing much happened for two years. The programme became serious only after the British MAUD report in 1941 concluded that a bomb was feasible with the material available, and became the Manhattan Project in 1942. Einstein had no further role and no clearance. He later said that signing it was the one great mistake of his life.
- Year: 1939 CE
- Category: Technology
