einstein

Americans rush to complete one? And shouldn’t policymakers think twice about using it against Japan when it might not be needed to secure
victory?
Einstein agreed to write another letter to President Roosevelt urging him to meet with Szilárd and other concerned scientists, but he went out of
his way to feign ignorance. “I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilárd proposes to submit to you,”
Einstein wrote. “The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilárd is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work;
however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those
members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy.” 34
Roosevelt never read the letter. It was found in his office after he died on April 12 and was passed on to Harry Truman, who in turn gave it to his
designated secretary of state, James Byrnes. The result was a meeting between Szilárd and Byrnes in South Carolina, but Byrnes was neither
moved nor impressed.
The atom bomb was dropped, with little high-level debate, on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima. Einstein was at the cottage he rented that
summer on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, taking an afternoon nap. Helen Dukas informed him when he came down for tea. “Oh, my God,” is all
he said. 35
Three days later, the bomb was used again, this time on Nagasaki. The following day, officials in Washington released a long history, compiled
by Princeton physics professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, of the secret endeavor to build the weapon. The Smyth report, much to Einstein’s lasting
discomfort, assigned great historic weight for the launch of the project to the 1939 letter he had written to Roosevelt.
Between the influence imputed to that letter and the underlying relationship between energy and mass that he had formulated forty years earlier,
Einstein became associated in the popular imagination with the making of the atom bomb, even though his involvement was marginal. Time put
him on its cover, with a portrait showing a mushroom cloud erupting behind him with E=mc 2 emblazoned on it. In a story that was overseen by an
editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose flair from the period:
Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in
history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and
hair like an aurora borealis . . . Albert Einstein did not work directly on the atom bomb. But Einstein was the father of the bomb in two important
ways: 1) it was his initiative which started U.S. bomb research; 2) it was his equation (E = mc 2 ) which made the atomic bomb theoretically
possible. 36
It was a perception that plagued him. When Newsweek did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All,” Einstein offered a
memorable lament. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I never would have lifted a finger.” 37
Of course, neither he nor Szilárd nor any of their friends involved with the bomb-building effort, many of them refugees from Hitler’s horrors, could
know that the brilliant scientists they had left behind in Berlin, such as Heisenberg, would fail to unlock the secrets. “Perhaps I can be forgiven,”
Einstein said a few months before his death in a conversation with Linus Pauling, “because we all felt that there was a high probability that the
Germans were working on this problem and they might succeed and use the atomic bomb and become the master race.” 38