Caption: “I saw no other way out,” Einstein wrote in a Japanese magazine in 1952, referring to the fact that he signed the letter. Article information
- Author, BBC News World
- Role, Editorial *
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August 10, 2024
In October 1939, Alexander Sachs, one of America’s leading economists, met with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Oval Office of the White House.
Sachs was no stranger to the Oval Office or Roosevelt, but the topic of conversation was usually economics.
That day, I had another matter to present to the president.
He carried with him a letter signed by Albert Einstein that is believed to have changed the course of history.
The letter has been given an estimated value of between US$4 million and US$6 million by auction house Christie’s when it goes on sale in New York in September.
It is part of an auction of artifacts belonging to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died in 2018 at the age of 65.
While there will be a variety of items reflecting his interest and influence in computing, that letter is anticipated to be the centerpiece.
One to which, despite the stature of the signer, Roosevelt initially did not pay much attention.
Other things were on his mind: less than 15 days earlier, Germany had invaded Poland; a war with unthinkable destructive potential was underway in Europe.
Sachs read him the letter, which had been written by a little-known immigrant Hungarian physicist named Leo Szilard.
But, to be honest, the whole nuclear thing, the chains and inconceivable energies were complicated for both of them.
“During the past four months it has become probable (…) that it will be possible to establish a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which large amounts of energy and large amounts of new elements similar to radium would be generated.”
The matter fell on deaf ears.
Caption: The original letter to the president is in the Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York. The one up for auction is a second, signed and slightly shorter version.
The president, however, invited his old friend for coffee the next morning.
There are moments that, when they happen, seem totally inconsequential, but they are going to change the world.
That was one of those moments.
A few months earlier…
News from across the Atlantic had been tormenting Szilard for months.
In January 1939, in Nazi Germany, scientists who had been his colleagues succeeded in splitting the atom using neutrons, a process called fission.
He had foreseen it half a decade earlier and knew what the consequences could be: nuclear war was no longer a fiction.
He feared that the Nazis might be more advanced in atomic research than everyone else.
But he also knew that no one would listen to him.
For the past few years, he had struggled to get scientists, politicians and military commanders to take him seriously.
They doubted that fission was possible, but he had been proven right.
Yet just a few weeks after the news of the fission broke, an article appeared in the New York Times in which his friend and colleague Enrico Fermi dismissed concerns about the new scientific discovery.
No one will be able to use fission for commercial or military purposes, he predicted, for at least 25 years, possibly 50 years.
I thought it was implausible, pure science fiction.
Fission split an atom with neutrons, which released energy and that was it.
However, Szilard believed that if an unstable atom could be made to fission, it would release more neutrons, which would split other unstable atoms, releasing more neutrons, and so on.
A chain reaction that would release an extraordinary amount of energy.
Caption: What tormented Szilard.
The physicist needed answers, and he found them at Columbia University in the spring of 1939 with his colleague Walter Zinn, an expert at rigging new and improbable experiments.
They found out that he was right. “The world was on its way to pain,” he would later write.
Fortunately, those trying to create a chain reaction had an obstacle: the released neutrons were traveling too fast for the atoms to absorb them.
But that detail was not going to stop the Nazis.
Operation D2O
How do neutrons slow down?
Well, it turns out that water works very well, but it absorbs so many neutrons that it becomes ineffective in a chain reaction.
However, if an isotope with an extra neutron (D₂O) is used instead of the two hydrogen atoms in H₂O, the problem is solved.
It is called heavy water but it is difficult to produce.
So the Nazi government sent representatives to Vemork, a hydroelectric power plant in Norway, where they were producing heavy water as a byproduct of their normal work.
The Germans offered to buy all existing supplies of heavy water at an impressive price, urging the plant to increase production.
But the Norwegians rejected the offer: although they did not know what Hitler’s plans were, they had no interest in being part of them.
A French Secret Service team then approached the plant and warned the Norwegians of the possible military purpose of their chemical byproduct.
The Norwegians insisted that the French take the entire stock without paying, but the Germans found out.
26 cans of heavy water were smuggled out in the dark of night.
It was a tense operation. The Nazi fighter planes were ready and waiting.
They targeted the aircraft they had seen the French officers boarding and forced it to land.
They approached it and what they discovered was failure.
Caption: Years later, in 1943, when Norway was under Nazi rule, 9 young Norwegians and a scientist carried out “the best attack” of World War II, destroying heavy water production at Vemork.
The water had been transported by rail and arrived safely in Paris, where a scientific team urgently began experiments.
The obvious candidate
The atomic race was underway, and although Szilard feared the existence of a bomb in general, he was more afraid of a Nazi bomb.
He imagined the devastation, the oppression, and was convinced that this previously unthinkable weapon was at hand.
He came to a simple conclusion: the Americans had to develop it before the Germans.
He had to convince them to do it. He had to offer them supreme power.
He needed an ally and thought: who is the scientist that even the most powerful in the world would not ignore?
It had been almost 20 years since he met Einstein in a conference room in Berlin.
And 15 years since they used to walk home together at the end of each day, sharing ideas about physics, philosophy and politics.
Now they were both exiled in the US and lived just a few miles away from each other.
But on that July 12, 1939, the world’s most famous scientist was on Long Island staying with a friend.
He went there to see him, together with his friend, colleague and fellow Hungarian Eugene Wigner.
Once Szilard explained the nuclear chain reaction to Einstein, and told him that he and Fermi had been conducting experiments, Einstein was shocked and alarmed.
His first response was, “I haven’t thought about that at all.”
The science was interesting: E=mc² in action.
But being a refugee from Nazi Germany, a committed pacifist and a politically conscious person, he immediately understood the potential of nuclear weapons in German hands.
Caption: Einstein and Szilard with the letter to President Roosevelt on Long Island.
Einstein agreed that the situation was urgent, with Germany primed for war.
In what he would later call the great mistake of his life, he agreed to sign a letter to Roosevelt prepared by Szilard warning him about German progress.
Szilard returned to New York with Einstein’s letter; all that remained was to get the letter to the president.
And that brings us back to Alexander Sachs.
Breakfast with a bomb
Sachs’ first meeting with Roosevelt had not gone very well, despite having Einstein’s signed letter with him.
The letter began by saying that uranium could “become a major new source of energy in the foreseeable future” but warned that “certain aspects of the situation that has emerged appear to require vigilance and, if necessary, prompt action by the government.”
He warned that a nuclear chain reaction “could lead to the production of bombs, and it is possible, though not certain, that extremely powerful bombs of a new type could be assembled in this way.”
But although he was ultimately referring to Nazi decisions regarding uranium from the Czechoslovak mines they controlled, Sachs knew he had baffled the president with so much scientific information.
However, the invitation to breakfast the next morning was a second chance to make the most powerful man in the world understand the danger that was coming.
And he came up with a plan.
Caption: Einstein told his friend Linus Pauling that signing the letter “was the great mistake of my life.”
If science wasn’t the way to win over that president, I’d tell him a story.
In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, a young American inventor offered Napoleon the opportunity to build a fleet of steamships that, he explained, would allow him to land in England regardless of the winds.
The idea of ships without sails seemed so absurd to Napoleon that he fired Robert Fulton, the inventor.
In addition to the steamboat, Fulton would build the first submarine and the first torpedoes.
Roosevelt was silent for several minutes, then said, “Alex, what you want is to make sure the Nazis don’t blow us to pieces.”
“Exactly,” Sachs replied.
The story of Fulton and Napoleon may have caught the president’s attention, but it was Albert Einstein’s letter written by Leo Sillard that convinced him.
The same month he received it, Roosevelt created the Uranium Advisory Committee.
Three years later, the United States initiated the Manhattan Project, which led to the first use of atomic weapons against Japan in 1945.
There are historians who draw a direct line between the letter and the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Others do not believe there is such a direct relationship, convinced that they would have developed them anyway.
Einstein, for his part, repeatedly and deeply regretted having signed the letter.
In a 1947 Newsweek article titled “The Man Who Started It All,” he is quoted as saying:
“If I had known that the Germans would not succeed in making an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger.”
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