Technology / Einstein

In the popular imagination, Albert Einstein is intimately associated with the atom bomb. A few months after the weapon was used against Japan in 1945, Time put him on its cover with an explosion mushrooming behind him that had E = mc² emblazoned on it. In a story overseen by an editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose from the period: “[T]here 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 = mc²) which made the atomic bomb theoretically possible.”

The 1945 Trinity nuclear explosion.

Image courtesy of US Govt. Defense
Threat Reduction Agency

Newsweek, likewise, did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All.” This was a perception fostered by the U.S. government. It had released an official history of the atom bomb project that assigned great weight to a letter Einstein had written to President Franklin Roosevelt warning of the destructive potential of an atomic chain reaction.

All of this troubled Einstein. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he told Newsweek, “I never would have lifted a finger.” He pointed out, correctly, that he had never actually worked on the bomb project. And he claimed to a Japanese publication, “My participation in the production of the atom bomb consisted in a single act: I signed a letter to President Roosevelt.”

Neither the public image nor the personal protests capture the true, complex story of Einstein and the bomb. Contrary to common belief, Einstein knew little about the nuclear particle physics underlying the bomb. On the other hand, as the archives show, Einstein did not merely sign the letter to Roosevelt. He was deeply involved in writing it, revising it, and deciding how to get it to the president.

The tale begins with Leó Szilárd, a charming and slightly eccentric Hungarian physicist who was an old friend of Einstein’s. While living in Berlin in the 1920s, they had collaborated on the development of a new type of refrigerator, which they patented but were unable to market successfully. After Szilárd fled the Nazis, he made his way to England and then New York, where he worked at Columbia University on ways to create a nuclear chain reaction, an idea he had conceived while waiting at a stoplight in London a few years earlier. When he heard of the discovery of fission using uranium, Szilárd realized that element might be used to produce this phenomenon.

Szilárd discussed the possibility with his friend Eugene Wigner, another refugee physicist from Budapest, and they began to worry that the Germans might try to buy up the uranium supplies of the Congo, which was then a colony of Belgium. But how, they asked themselves, could two Hungarian refugees in America find a way to warn the Belgians? Then Szilárd recalled that Einstein happened to be friends with that country’s Queen Elizabeth.