The einstein-szilard letter
Szilàrd and Einstein sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning of the theorized German nuclear bomb and suggesting the U.S. initiate its own nuclear program."
-John Kurshctek, former U.S. Army foreign policy specialist
Einstein and Szilárd working on the letter.
A copy of the original text of the letter. Click on the letter to view a larger version.
TEXT:
Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilárd... leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future.
TEXT:
In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America.
TEXT:
I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
“Einstein and Szilard only knew that Hitler was working on a nuclear arsenal, but not at what magnitude. The current non-atomic WMDs the U.S. had at the time were much stronger than any nuclear bomb Germany would ever build."
-Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project; a reflection of the construction of the nuclear arsenal
This lack of knowledge prompted the development of the U.S. atomic arsenal.
-Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project; a reflection of the construction of the nuclear arsenal
This lack of knowledge prompted the development of the U.S. atomic arsenal.
The Manhattan Project
“The Manhattan Project began in 1941. In September 1942, the U.S. built a facility for nuclear research at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Chemical separation units for plutonium and uranium were developed in Hanford, Washington and Oak Ridge, Tennessee." -Edward Teller, Los Alamos National Laboratory An aerial view of a separation facility of the T Plant at Hanford, Washington. Courtesy of the Dept. of Energy, Hanford.
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Please click on the red markers below for a more detailed description of the sites at Hanford and Oak Ridge.
The K-25 plant used the gaseous diffusion method to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. Courtesy of the Dept. of Energy.
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The U.S. government had realized its responsibility to protect its people against the Nazi nuclear threat and assumed its sovereign right of developing a nuclear arsenal.
“The bomb was... talked about... to be a deterrent against Germany."
- Alex Wellerstein, Associate Historian at the Center for History of Physics
“The Manhattan Project was carried out in extreme secrecy. By 1945, the project had nearly 40 laboratories and factories which employed approximately 200,000 people. Among these employees were some of the greatest scientist(s) that have ever lived... J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the project, and his team of physicists spent over two years developing a prototype weapon... A plutonium bomb exploded at Trinity Test site on July 16th, 1945."
- Rice University, National Science Foundation Fellowship Program
Ultimately, protectionism held priority; therefore, the rights the U.S. had to develop atomic weapons were
not majorly debated.
Please scroll through using the arrows below for more information regarding Los Alamos and the Trinity nuclear test.
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