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
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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
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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."
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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.
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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/ …
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Which raises the interesting question: why do we always talk about Einstein as the instigation, and the importance of the Einstein letter?
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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?
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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 …
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End of conversation
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