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80 years ago yesterday, Albert Einstein signed a letter written by him and Leo Szilard to FDR recommending that the US government pay more attention to new developments in atomic energy.pic.twitter.com/fAyfQT3sb4
There are a lot of misconceptions about this letter, some of which can be resolved by just reading it. For example, it didn't actually recommend that the US build a nuclear weapon. Its recommendations are actually quite modest compared to what occurred:pic.twitter.com/F5Xv3zvfTt
Additionally, I don't really think it's right to say that this letter "started the Manhattan Project." I read "Manhattan Project" as "the US project to actually build a nuclear weapon." That didn't start until 1942, and its instigator was the UK's MAUD Report.pic.twitter.com/OeeshQYNsO
It's even been argued (by I.I. Rabi) that the Einstein-Szilard letter hampered the work in the US, by moving it too quickly into a slow regime of government secrecy, before the research was "mature."
I don't know about that, but the Uranium Committee, which the Einstein letter did spawn, was not the Manhattan Project by any definition, and would not have resulted in a nuclear weapon by the end of World War II had the UK not spurred the US to change the program dramatically.
I've written on the misconceptions that surround Einstein and the atomic bomb at some length a few years ago — his relevance and importance is vastly overstated on the whole. If he had never lived, I don't think it would have changed the timeline much.http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/06/27/bomb-without-einstein/ …
Which raises the interesting question: why do we always talk about Einstein as the instigation, and the importance of the Einstein letter?
I would just note that US gov't propaganda since 1945 has pushed the importance of Einstein, even including copies of the letter with the Smyth Report. The argument, I think, is pretty clear: if Einstein (a pacifist and genius) was supportive of the A-bomb, who could disagree?
Einstein himself was happy to take up that sense of importance and responsibility, to push his own political agenda — which included (ironically? maybe not) the abolition of nuclear weapons. http://umich.edu/~pugwash/Manifesto.html …
This subject interests me a lot because it gets at how we conceive of R&D programs, and the extent to which matters of time and money are crucial (if you're the one who wants to get moving, inaction feels intolerable, but to what extent is that just bellyaching?) ...
In '39 Szilard is upset the gov't isn't ponying up for his and Fermi's tabletop experiments at Columbia (plus maybe a couple similarly small-scale programs at Carnegie Institute, etc.), but by '41-'42 the investment utterly dwarfs those initial experiments...
So, did it really matter the gov't took some extra months to get into gear, and its investment came in below initial expectations, when it caught up so quickly soon enough through the action of the more mainstream NDRC? ...
I think Rabi's argument is that if it hadn't been thrown into the quagmire of NRC/Navy funding, research would have continued at the pre-secrecy pace (fairly quick), and reached the "is it doable?" question earlier. I don't know if that's true.
Yeah, that's an interesting alternative question, if research actually slowed down. That said, my impression was they had hit a wall after the early work because they needed $$ for more graphite and uranium.
Rabi, Szilard, and others blamed Briggs for screwing up communication between groups, keeping UK info from the US scientists, etc. — that's their main complaint of NRC management
Immigrants get the job done.
That was an important letter.
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